The Vicious Kind
by Marianne Bennet
Summary: A courier makes a bad life choice and walks a little too far into the abandoned bunker east of Nelson. Lucky for her, she has a sniper to come looking. Unlucky for him, a certain fox is under strict orders to find her too. Father Elijah kindly lets them in on the heist of the century. Not that they asked for it. Whoever said Hell is other people knew what they were talking about.
1. Can't Breathe

**1: Can't Breathe  
**

She can't breathe.

 _"Has your life taken a turn? Do troubles beset you? Has fortune left you behind? If so, the Sierra Madre Casino, in all its glory, is inviting you to begin again…"_

God help her, she can't breathe.

 _"…Stroll along the winding streets of our beautiful resort, make new friends, or rekindle old flames…"_

Someone help her because God doesn't seem to want to, she can't breathe.

 _"…So if life's worries have weighed you down, if you need an escape from your troubles, or if you just need an opportunity to begin again, join us, let go, and leave the world behind at the Sierra Madre grand opening this October... We'll be waiting."_

He calls her Cat-Eyes sometimes when the memory of a dead wife wasn't too over-bearing. It makes her wonder sometimes just how many lives she has left as she imagines the green light in her eyes flicker to black like a burnt out bulb.

* * *

He spots her through his sniper scope. It isn't the first time.

Her sun-bleached hair hangs in curtains as callused fingers fiddle with the hatch. He doesn't know if she stumbled upon it, or had looked for it all along. He tracked her all of the way from the damned dinosaur and he couldn't tell if she was running away from something or running to it. He still can't tell, especially when the hatch pops and she slips inside, familiar and fearless.

He surveys the cards he has to play with. Nelson gives way to the Colorado in lesser crags and greater cliffs and he doesn't know the shape of it. Getting down there should take a day's scrambling descent, but that's being optimistic. It's an uncomfortably learned behavior.

The first time had been twilight and he had spotted her through shredded teeth and faded crosshairs. She hadn't looked like trouble, a soft-looking thing with fuzz for a hairline. Weren't any pretty young things left in Novac to make a comparison, so resemblance to a ghost meant nothing.

The second time was daylight and he could read her belt buckle with uncomfortable accuracy. "I don't care what color his armor is. He's a kid. You're not shooting him." He decided she was trouble after all but likely more trouble without him.

It takes him two days to make the descent without skirting too close to Cottonwood. He wouldn't mind shooting the place up, but there's other trouble to find. He keeps the hatch in sight and doesn't see her leave.

The lock is disengaged when he reaches it, and it makes him both grateful and worried. It isn't like her.

A seductive voice rolls out a familiar pitch as his boots echo against the bunker floor. He remembers that she's not from the Mojave. He's heard rumors, whispers on the wind, but never thought anyone would be stupid enough—

Makes him doubly stupid, he thinks, looking at an empty room. The radio winks at him as the gas swirls in.

* * *

Five days. It seems the hound has finally turned up something useful. Good dog.

The greatest of Caesar's frumentarii lowers his binoculars and sets up camp. He waits through the night for the woman extraordinary enough to earn Caesar's attention and her degenerate soldier to emerge from their den. They do not. Possibly having a sweaty little futūtum. He chuckles and leans back against the cliff.

Caesar was not pleased when he heard she ignored his mandate to go to the Lucky 38 and end House. He dispatched the one man he trusted to find her. To bribe her. To entreat her. To seduce her.

To take apart her beloved NCR dog piece by piece until she bent her will to theirs.

They are certainly taking their time with it. He does not entirely blame the degenerate. She is a beautiful woman. Even smudged with soot, blood, and sin in the ashes of that abysmal town.

One does not become the mastermind of bloody intrigue after bloody intrigue without the gift of patience. But the memory of her sneering down her nose at him, flanked by fires and crosses, sends him climbing down through the hatch and into the earth beneath.

A woman's voice cajoles him to a licentious gambling den just as he is mandated to cajole her to align her interests with those of the Legion. He does not understand these profligates and their vices; there were some houses in Arizona but he will of Caesar decimated them all. He moves slowly through the bunker, listening for a man's murmur, a woman's sigh, beneath the chatter.

He finds the radio perched upon a table, but not her.

He looks down and sees her degenerate sniper's body on the floor, but not hers.

When the toxic gas rolls over him, sends him gasping onto his knees, it is a wonder he does not fall upon his own blade in failure.


	2. Seeing Red

**2: Seeing Red  
** _  
"…Begin again… Begin again… Begin. Again…"_

How many times will she have to begin again before it would be enough?

There is no cot this time, but she feels just as sunken into herself as before. Before. The good doctor of good Goodsprings had asked her her name. She had ran unknown fingers adorned with unknown calluses along the raised lettering of all but ruined novels on his shelf, avoiding an answer. Picking a book, picking a page, picking a name, she called herself _"Stella"_ and the good doctor had the good grace not to judge her.

He had let her keep the ruined book too. She doesn't have it with her now. Her fingers grapple at a vanished belt and panic rises in her throat. Taking a shallow, sharp breath, she drowns in fire.

Her eyes fly open and they burn too. Her pupils dart defiantly, searching for some landmark. But from a vantage point pressed against what feels like jagged tiles, all there is are blurs of crimson and cardinal. Too much of that color to go around, she thinks, pushing herself up with smarting palms. _"Their pansy-ass skirts are red,"_ a whiskey-soaked companion had once remarked, _"and so are their guts and they're all the easier t' spill for it."_

 _"Errybody's guts're red,"_ she had countered, a little whiskey-soaked herself, clinking glasses to the razzle-dazzle of the Strip: the last time she had had a drink. There is no booze to dull the terror when she realizes the burning air is not the only reason it is hard to breathe.

The metal around her throat seems to tighten when she realizes its presence. She folds up like a shattered house of cards, irony in spades all over again. Fled the Mojave at the mere sight of banners and collars and now her throat is caged in a scarlet-washed world. The memory of a snake-smiling man flickers into focus. What is his name?

Static crackles, calling her attention to a fountain that's lost its purpose. _"Are you listening? Good. From now on, when I talk, listen and follow my instructions."_

Her so-called master, she presumes. Good. Easier to find someone with a voice. She hadn't remembered the checkered suit from the graveyard, but she had memorized his slime-ridden tones down pat. _"Play stupid, play clever, make the mistake of saying 'no'? That collar on your neck'll go off and take your head with it."_

She doesn't remember if she's stupid or clever so it shouldn't be a problem. And if there's one thing she knows, it's that she can't say no. So that'll be a bonus.

* * *

Craig Boone wakes up choking, and he knows it's not on vomit after a night's drinking. Training kicks in. He presses a hand over his mouth and regulates his oxygen intake before he looks for the cause of distress. Fix it now. Figure it out later.

The world is red, which might be a problem. He squints watering eyes. Sunglasses are gone; so's his beret and rifle, and that's definitely a problem.

A quick survey tells him that he is alone. It concerns him how much of a problem that feels. After the last disappointment, he'd sworn not to get attached to another spotter. He's perfectly capable of picking his own targets and hasn't got the energy for anybody else's.

So what the hell's he doing here?

He's getting the hell out of here is what. He's getting that girl, throwing her over his shoulder, and getting them both the hell out of here. Irritation spurring him to his feet, he ignores the burning sky and swallows, trying to wet the back of his throat. It's then that he feels the collar. It's then that he panics.

His knuckles slam into tiles to the four-syllable beat of _fucking Legion_. 'Cause it's got to be them. Hatch was too close to Cottonwood. What else makes sense?

But he's alone and that doesn't make sense.

"Carla," he whispers to air that singes his throat and knows he needs to find another lost girl before it's too late.

The ground beneath him shifts in response and he freezes. Something is stirring in that red fog and he can't see it yet. Doesn't mean it isn't there.

* * *

It's far from his first time coming to on a hard floor, but that doesn't make it any more pleasant. Vulpes spent a good deal of time unconscious during the training that had earned him his survival. He prefers not to be reminded of those days. Alas, it is not to be.

It's pitch black and moist, and he appreciates neither. There's something around his neck. He knows what it is. He has felt it before.

His entire body jolts in protest: sitting up and curling forward. His hands grapple at the nape of his neck as his breath comes out in sharp gusts. His armor is gone. He tries to steady himself, but he can't quite manage it. Not yet. He licks his lips and remembers who he is, not who he was. He is Vulpes Inculta. He is the greatest of Caesar's Frumentarii. He is nothing like that pathetic tribal from before.

The person that used to be that pathetic tribal from before looks up and the nightmare intensifies.

His face had often felt the shadow of bars but it had always been from the other side. This time he is not only collared, but caged. The sound of heavy breathing tells him he is not alone. His suspicions are quickly confirmed.

"You look like food… smell like food, Dog… hungry."


	3. Ghosts by the Number

**3: Ghosts by the Number  
**

The shoulders of a hulking darkness tense and relax, a growl slowly building with each intake of breath and the scent that accompanies each inhale. Vulpes watches, his own anxiety settling with the presence of another's, and he knows what he has to do.

"You smell like food," the nightkin mumbles again and Vulpes permits himself a slight smirk.

"I am not food," he says, cold and clipped, and he is ready when the abomination throws himself at him. He is in his feet in an instant, crouched and calm, and only has to take a step to dodge the battering ram of an attack. The nightkin slams hard into the concrete wall, arms and teeth empty of presumed prey. Slowly, his head turns to glare at the frumentarius with both loathing and need.

Vulpes does not flinch even as the nightkin's foul breath envelopes them both. "I am not food," he says again as if training one of Anthony's filthy mutts.

"Food never thinks it's food," the abomination mutters, almost a whine, and even a frumentarius must appreciate the misplaced wisdom of its words. Especially a frumentarius.

The cell door catches his eye and he takes slow, measured steps in its direction. His efforts do not go unnoticed. "Won't work," the nightkin sniffles and there is something almost pathetic about the beast. Good. Vulpes can work with that. "He put us here. He locked the door. He is… starving me."

Not really, if whoever 'he' is knows that the abomination has no qualms consuming humans, but Vulpes is not in the mood to split hairs. But he does not know how long he has before the nightkin does make another attempt to devour him and Vulpes is unarmed. "Good," he says crisply. "You could do to learn some restraint."

It doesn't like that. It doesn't like that at all and Vulpes reminds himself that he is accustomed to the manipulation of creatures with slightly more humanity. The dregs of humanity perhaps, but still. He has never seen a nightkin alive for longer than a few minutes.

"You sound like him," the abomination mutters. "You sound like him."

The nightkin lunges forward a second time. Vulpes is not quite so quick. With a dull thunk, his back slams against the concrete wall, his feet lifted an unknown height off of the floor. Still, he keeps his face impassive, unflinching, save for a slight raise of one eyebrow. Fear is just a chemical, and he prides himself on never using a stimulant once in his life.

The collar around his neck begins to beep.

* * *

 _"Around the Villa are three other collars like yours: Collar Eight, Collar Seventeen, and Eighteen. And don't get any fresh ideas about killing them off and claiming the vault for yourself. One dies, you all die. Instantly."_ Father Elijah pauses, lets it sink in. _"Find all three and get them here, to the Fountain. Then we'll talk more."_

She wets her lips. "Don't you want to know my name?" her voice croaks out.

 _"No. You are Sixteen, and that is enough."_

Figures. Not like anyone in this world wants to know her name. Unwillingly, she remembers all of the times she is told that being a stranger makes her 'good enough.' She is sick of having to be good enough. Maybe she just wants to be good. And 'good' as in fine. Normal. Okay. Being good-good is too much damn work.

Eight, Seventeen, Eighteen. Eight, Seventeen, Eighteen. The numbers replay through her interior monologue when she isn't preoccupied with trying to be invisible, trying to melt into the red herself and slip like smoke past the shadowy figures prowling through the fog. Eight, Seventeen, Eighteen. And Sixteen. She is Sixteen. She does the math. Eight's been stuck here a long time and another eight fortune hunters must have died between their arrivals. Seventeen. Eighteen. She tries to envision the two other fools that must have rushed into the trap days, hours, moments after she did.

 _Boone_.

* * *

Something vaguely human-sounding shrieks out in the cloud. The sniper has less than seconds to ready himself before it's on top of him.

Sheer mass knocks him onto his ass, hard armored ridges pressing against the thin material of whatever jumpsuit his captor decided to dress him up in. Head hitting the pavement, he finds himself face to face with a bug-eyed caricature of a gas mask, and that just pisses him off even more. Craig Boone plans to die, but he'll be damned if it's to something whose face he can't spit in.

The glint of a knife hovers dangerous close to his throat as his attacker crows in triumph. The metal blade is strangely crackled with multicolor, but it's a bit more disturbing that it's that close to his eyes. With a growl of his own, he brings his knee up between them, plants the flat of his foot against the person's -the thing's -abdomen, and pushes.

With a screech, it falls sideways, landing on its back and squirming like an upturned radroach. Needing to keep it pinned down, he clambers onto its chest with a grunt of exertion, dodging flailing limbs, shoves its right arm hard against the pavement with one forearm, and tries to pry the knife's hilt from its hand. The thing's fingers refuse to budge, so he slides the weapon out of its grip, ignoring the thing's howling as its fingers are sliced off by the knife's edge. Yet there is no blood when the twitching digits drop to the pavement.

Clumsily, he stabs the shimmering metal blade into the cavity between the thing's arm and shoulder again and again until it slumps against him. Disgusted by it like he is by so much of this world, he shoves the fresh corpse aside and takes in several painful breaths before he gets back up.

The ghost gets back up too.

* * *

She tries to feel gratitude for the pursuit and only feels terror. For both of them. She pushes it down like the bile in her throat, all choked up by the accursed collar and her own accursed _feelings_.

Who else? Who else? Arcade knows his duty to the Mojave, Veronica hers to the Brotherhood and she doesn't want to think about what the chirpy little sprite would make of her former mentor's… new character. Cass… It's got to be Cass, she decides as she tracks the twin blips for Eight and Eighteen on her Pip-Boy map to the decaying carcass of an old world police station.

Inside, it's damp and murky. Easier to breathe, harder to see. The humidity makes the air a different kind of cloying. Sticky, and it doesn't play well with the acidic residue on her skin, but she ignores it like so much else.

A hulking nightkin mutters delirious complaints about hunger, a master, and voices in his head that he apparently doesn't get along with, its back to her, something pressed between it and the concrete wall. _Eight_ , she deduces and her Pip-Boy agrees.

The mutant is not the only monster in the cage, she realizes, seeing ice blue eyes glinting at her in the dim light over the nightkin's massive shoulder. The unsettling perfect bow of his lips curls into a smile that makes her toes curl in mute reply. But he can't see that. She would have to shoot him if he could see that and she doesn't think she can fit the ridiculously large rifle Father Elijah left her through the narrow bars.

"Well, well, well," the man with the snake-smile says, voice smooth and slick even when pressed up against a wall. "What's our favorite courier doing so far from the Strip? Don't you have a special delivery to give to Mr. House?"

* * *

 _guest reviewer: Thank you! When I thought of this concept, I really couldn't stop myself from writing it (it held all of my Dragon Age and Halo work hostage until I did). As for the length, it is a result of my efforts to practice less wordy prose than I usually write. The chapters will, however, get much longer as the characters meet. Dialogue is my favorite thing in the world after all._


	4. Checkerboard Tactics

**4: Checkerboard Tactics  
**

The material of his jumpsuit tears between the abomination's claws. The beeping of the infernal collar that he did not want to remember existed picks up pace. Sadly, those are mere minor annoyances when contrasted to the larger picture at hand.

The somehow special courier looks slowly between Vulpes and the nightkin, an oddly crafted rifle at the ready. It is not the first time the frumentarius wondered if the two bullet scars along her hairline are the mark of some more permanent damage. Then, suddenly, her focus shifts and she fires her weapon off at what looked like a radio for some odd reason. Pity she did not think to do the same to the radio transmitter in the abandoned bunker.

For its part, the leering nightkin freezes at her arrival, which Vulpes is quite grateful for, as disembowelment by abomination would not have been his preferred means of death. Although he wonders what about the courier gives the monster such pause. She isn't nearly as striking as he remembers. He notes the collar around her own throat and is surprised at the annoyance he feels at its presence.

"I could ask you the same thing," she says in response to his question, "except you're not my favorite anything."

Are they pretending that there isn't a nightkin at his throat? Very well. He can play with that. He shrugs artlessly despite his predicament. "Expecting someone else?"

"Anyone else."

He smiles again, showing just the tips of his teeth. "That is a shame."

Giving him one hard look, she turns her attention to the nightkin. "Put him down."

"I would prefer it if you just shot the abomination and was done with it," he remarks casually and the creature's grip at his clavicle tightens in response.

"Maybe I haven't decided which abomination I want to shoot yet."

His eyebrows raise. Bluffing. She must be. Why rob herself of the chance to watch the abomination tear his eyes from his sockets, and he asks her so.

"Maybe I want the satisfaction of doing it myself."

A bloodthirsty streak? He can play with that too. And have so much pleasure doing so, he predicts. There is the small matter of the collars around their necks. And the nightkin at his, but she appears to have that well in hand. The beast seems stunned by not only her arrival, but by their exchange. He questions idly how long it has been since the nightkin has observed two beings interact civilly with one another. Barely civilly, he should say.

"Put him down," she says again, leveling her rifle at the beast. She stands her ground, barely standing taller than her target's lowest rib, and yet it obeys, skulking back to its corner of the holding cell, muttering about a master's toys.

Recovering his dignity -was it ever really gone? -he straightens his ripped collar and gives her a mocking little dip of a bow. "Vulpes Inculta, if you've forgotten."

She rolls her eyes. "At my service?"

His eyes flick up to meet hers. "Well, that depends, doesn't it?" he remarks, voice at its silkiest.

Her hand palms the desk, picking up a thick layer of residue that makes her hiss through her teeth at contact with skin, before pulling out one drawer after another.

"Not what you're looking for?" Vulpes asks her, eyebrow arched. They both know that she's going to let him out. What choice does she really have?

"No key, if that's what you're asking."

He looks between the interior door on the other side of the station and the monster huddled in the cell's opposite corner. Nightkin, even apparently senile ones, don't stay cowed for long, and they both know it. "Better hurry then," he comments as if he doesn't care but he does and they both know that too.

* * *

With large, lurching steps, the creature in the mask stumbles toward him, gloved, claw-like hands outstretched and grasping like pincers. Boone spots a doorway -he always was good at spotting -and dives through it, finding the remains of a bar or maybe a diner. Broken bottles and upturned tables on a checkerboard floor; it is a landscape he knows well.

When the thing follows, he sweeps a shrapnel storm of shattered glass into its face. Ignoring the edges that cut into his own hand, the pain is nothing compared to the disappointment when the shards _ping_ softly against a hard exoskeleton. The thing is down a hand though; the sawed off fingers didn't snap back into place and that's when Boone gets one of his rare great ideas.

Although it should go to say that he always was good at killing stuff.

He ducks behind the bar, looking for a blade a little more substantial than the glittering little thing he's got clenched in his fist. He kicks the lid off of a rusted metal box, barely has time to register the fancy cursive letter D scratched onto the lid. With a rare stroke of luck, he finds a 9 mm and at least a couple rounds of ammo. It's not his rifle, but it'll do.

No time to reload; he's gonna have to make do with what's already locked in and pray. Never was much for prayers, but if this isn't a foxhole he doesn't know what is.

The thing crows victory when it find shim behind the bar. Turning on the balls of his feet, he brings the pistol up and goes trigger-happy. Bullets slam into the gas mask and its head snaps back with the impact. Seizing the opportunity, Boone slams his shoulder into the thing's solar plexus and hits the checkerboard floor with it.

It goes down again, gasping and shrieking, and this time he knows his time is limited before it comes back up.

Sawing away with the glimmering knife, Boone takes the thing apart piece by piece. It comes apart like one of those little crab-things that lives in the murk of Lake Las Vegas, hard shell and squishy inside. He's never gonna be able to eat crawfish with First Recon again. He looks up, eyes watering from the fog even though it's better inside, and that's when he sees the bits and pieces of beings in jumpsuits like the one he's wearing scattered across the diner floor.

He guesses he's lucky the things didn't eat him while he was out. He doesn't feel lucky.

* * *

She does hurry, although it isn't for his benefit. At this point, she just wants it all to be over.

Was there ever a point at which she didn't?

The other monster in the cage, the less obvious one, watches her when she comes back out of the basement, armed with both a new weapon and new understanding, but says nothing… yet. He is surprisingly uncritical, at the moment anyway, but it strikes her that she might prefer his judgment to the obnoxiously amused look on his face. The Legion bastard in no position to be judging anybody, she tells herself, but she's long since learned that it's useless to keep somebody from laughing.

If he's watching her, she's going to make it damn clear that she's got her eye on him. But there are other things to take care of first.

"Where is Master?" the disturbed nightkin mumbles as she approaches its side of the cell first. "Did he go away? Dog will be good this time."

Holding up her hand, she makes sure it sees the recovered tape in her grasp. "Let yourself out. One chance and one chance only."

The nightkin only howls louder at the sight of the tape. The other abomination watches impassively, and she struggles to make her face the same, even as the short-term memory of the voice in the basement croons within her skull, _"Now I'll use you. And that Pip-Boy you're wearing."_

"I do so hope you have a key," Vulpes remarks with bright eyes and deceptive smoothness; deceptive because with each passing moment, the nightkin -Dog, she knows now -moans its hunger.

"Do you?" she mutters, turning one knob on her device and then the other until the slot slides open on the top of her Pip-Boy. "You're not a very good spy, are you?"

"I am the greatest of Caesar's frumentarii," he reminds her stiffly.

She doesn't hide her smile. "Then he must not've set the bar very high."

Slowly, deliberately, she slides the tape into her Pip-Boy and prays that she's making the right choice to let both monsters out of the cage. Who is she kidding? It's her only choice. She hits the button and the voice answers, smaller and less chilling when emitted from a tiny speaker but just as commanding, _"Dog! Back in the cage!"_

The physical transformation is limited: a tilt to the chin, a roll of the shoulders. But there is new consciousness, new intent, when the nightkin locks eyes with the courier on the other side of the bars.

"What have we here?" Casting a glance between courier and legionary, the nightkin transformed looks less than amused. "You weren't who I was expecting. I'm disappointed. Still, you cannot be a complete fool, you on the other side at least," he adds the addendum with a scornful look cast in Vulpes' direction. "Or perhaps you are, with that leash on your arm and the one around your necks… With our collars and manacles, we might as well all be kin."

* * *

 _Quick note: any feedback, any at all, is very much appreciated! I cannot stress this enough. Thanks!_


	5. What You Wanted to See

**5: What You Wanted to See  
**

It strikes Vulpes that he may have preferred dealing with the other face of the nightkin, mentally diseased as it had been. This new character regards his company with logical eyes and his voice rumbles with logical words, but Vulpes has caught enough glimpses before the curtain fell of a leader, both audacious and astute, writhing on his cot, plagued by a pain that did not exist in the physical realm by his advisors' evaluations. He knows that disease of the mind can assume other, more civilized forms.

He hopes she knows this too, as she is the one with the weapon on the other side of those bars.

To her credit, she does not lower her weapon. Shotgun diplomacy has its uses, he assumes, and the wasteland has taught her well. But the question she choses to ask has an infuriatingly obvious answer. "You're not Dog," she asks, "are you?"

"Dog," it repeats and barks a sharp sound that Vulpes interprets as a laugh. "No. Not quite. And yet…"

It smiles a soft leer, revealing broken teeth: an interesting if rather distasteful profile from Vulpes' viewpoint. "Dog knows I'm here, but can't do anything about it. He knows that my intervention is necessary. It is medicine, a bitter pill to which he refuses to acclimate. I… protect him from the persuasions of those wishing to manipulate his instincts. I keep him tame, keep him from hurting us, from doing… foolish things. "

 _'Foolish things'…fututus et mori in igni…_ The confidence in the abomination's voice makes Vulpes want to reach out and confirm that those bars are truly there, test that they are not some hallucination brought on by the chemicals hovering in the moist air. But he knows that they are indeed there and so he tests the abomination instead. "And you have done a splendid job of it so far."

The beast turns on him, as he knew it would. If nothing else, perhaps triggering a temper will in turn trigger the girl into pulling the trigger of her weapon and shooting the nightkin in the skull… so many triggers, it's near enough to make his head spin. But it is with words rather than claws that the abomination attacks and there is strange admirability in it:

"And who are you to claim to know what is foolish and what is not? This is a different world than which you are accustomed and that which seems illogical may prove precisely the opposite in time." The nightkin's new face, perhaps madder than the last, contorts, taking in heavy breaths. "No. I know what I do here. What I have done."

"I am Vulpes Inculta, chief frumentarius of Caesar's Legion," he tells the beast just so that there are no misunderstandings, but it is even less impressed than that maddening courier was with his surprise appearance on the Strip.

"Names and titles, titles and names, none of which mean anything to us," is the contemptuous reply but it is interesting to hear the use of the inclusive plural. He wonders if the girl has the sense to take the same notes he does. Unlikely. "There is the Old Man and there is Dog and Dog must be protected. There is the Old Man and there is God and I must be avenged. That is enough."

That is hardly enough to even begin to secure a grasp on his predicament, but he assumes that the facts will unfold in due time. So he settles back with certainty and lets the courier ask the questions that make her look like a fool but are necessary all the same.

"Look, I don't see a collar on you, but it's obviously around you somewhere," she says stubbornly and Vulpes assumes that the machine on her arm has thus informed her. "Someone who makes it their business to not do foolish things wouldn't've foolishly locked themself in there without having a back-up plan. In case of emergency or whatnot. So where is it?"

"Thin and metal," Vulpes cannot resist adding under the pretense of being helpful. "Rusted, if judging by the condition of the gate. Even your mutated mind can visualize such, I assume."

She casts him a withering look that lacks appreciation, but the nightkin is only amused. "You have unsurprisingly limited visions of what keys can be. The key is the Old Man, of course. The one who brought us all here."

"You are not the only one who would look favorably upon an audience with this person," Caesar's favorite interrogator remarks. Only what he truly means is that he wants to take this 'Old Man' apart piece by piece, to hear him screaming and screeching as limb is stacked upon limb… but he does not make mention of that, of course.

"Well, he isn't here," she points out, "and I don't know where he is. And we need to go."

That is a universal fact. "If it does have the key in here," Vulpes offers silkily, but while it is directed to the courier, it is the pride of the abomination that he wishes to prick, "why not do away with it and let me unlock the door? It is an energy weapon, no? Surely you can narrow the scope to fit through the bars."

"I know how to shoot a gun," is the testy reply, "and, more importantly, I know when not to."

"Then by all means continue," he stretches and yawns false contentment. "Only do consider who it is attempting to protect this Dog from. There are only so many characters in this little drama, after all."

She is beginning to understand, or perhaps she understood all along and she was merely testing him. He can never be sure. But he has learned to read people and he reads her now and he sees that she does. "Dog obeys Elijah."

"I assume the beast heels nicely," he finishes her thought smoothly even as a growl begins to build in the nightkin's throat. Good. The sooner the abomination's temper is riled, the sooner she will be forced to decide it was the correct time to shoot the gun. He addresses his next words to the mutant itself. "Doesn't it?"

"You… have some means of contacting the Old Man?" the mutant asks the courier.

She doesn't answer. Vulpes takes her silence as a no. The nightkin takes it as otherwise. "You…" it barely gets the word out, slowly, sputtering, and Vulpes feels no small amount of satisfaction as the beast trembles with rage, its massive arms twitching, the muscles in its legs seizing up. "Don't play it! If you do, I'll end you. I'll murder you, crush your arms and legs until…"

Until what? The courier would not get to find out what, not while she stands where she stands now. No, it's the fool on the other side of the bars that will receive a teasing glimpse of the consequences, Vulpes realizes as the twin-faced nightkin lunges for him like a mad dog.

* * *

He isn't used to being on his own. Even on the trek to Novac, he'd had Manny watching the rear all of the way down the interstate with Carla sandwiched between them, all wide eyes, fists full of cactus blossoms and drizzling blood from where the spines had pricked her fingers. At camp, she'd giggled as he kisses each of the pinpricks better and they'd both tried to forget the way her mother had screamed for her husband to get his shotgun when Carla had announced their elopement.

 _"He'll be the death of you. Mark my words, girl."_

Now Boone strips the long abandoned diner clean and tries to banish his ghosts. Doesn't work, but then when has it ever really? Would be a helluva lot simpler with booze, but he gives the dust-encrusted bottle of whiskey a long last look and shuts the liquor cabinet, leaving it full up for the first time he can remember. There's a troublemaker to find and more corporeal ghosts to kill and he's gotta keep his reaction times at peak if he's gonna live long enough to do either.

When the shelves and counters stand shivering like skeletons, he takes inventory: two boxes of Cram, a half-full baggie of Sugar Bombs, one can with the label so faded he can't make it out, not that he was ever much for reading. Pork n Beans or something like it, like it really matters at this point. Hardly enough for one person, let alone two, but he doesn't even know if she's here.

He doesn't even know who took them, though Boone's got his suspicions. Always does.

He doesn't even know where he is; he can add that to the list real easy. But he knows how to fix that. Maybe. Gotta try.

Boone slings the burlap sack over one shoulder, holds the cached pistol at the ready, and starts a solo trek to find higher ground

* * *

Vulpes' back slams into the cell wall for the second occasion that day, familiar claws sinking into familiar places on his throat, layering bruise upon bruise. He achieved his goal, he reflects grimly as the digits close in on his air passages. He provoked the beast. Now all that remains is for the courier to deliver.

Unless she truly meant that she wants to watch him die. And unpleasantly at that.

Yet the nightkin does not even look at its victim. "You will go!" it rails at the courier. "You will go and you will fetch me the Old Man or this one will die. I swear it. I command it. I will be no one's cur, not this time and never again!"

The fact it still speaks alerts Vulpes to the fact that she has not shot it yet.

"Don't you dare," she says instead of shooting, "or I swear it will be the last thing you will do."

"Will it?" the abomination sneers and his grip grows even tighter. The girl seems about to say something else, but Vulpes does not trust her to save him at this point.

"Don't be foolish," he manages to get out, claiming the nightkin's attention, trading oxygen for words, survival for survival. "Even should the Old Man arrive, he would order you back into the cage with a single syllable."

"Or I can do that right now," her voice cuts through the haze of lightheadedness. Through the haze, he thinks that he can hear the treble of it tremble some, but he cannot be sure. He is sure, however, that he sees her fingers hover above the device on her arm. "Right here. And then you _will_ put him down. You'll have no choice."

It is a long moment as the nightkin considers their argument, and a longer moment before Vulpes feels the tension in the talons locked around his throat relax and before feels his feet brush the floor. He folds in on himself as he gently hits the floor, doubling over and trying not to wheeze.

"I relish the day when I can cut out his tongue," the two-faced nightkin mutters, looking at some indiscernible speck on the floor, "and yours as well," he adds, sneering down at Vulpes. "To think I yield to another chasing greed-blind into—"

"I'm not chasing greed-blind into anything," she says steadily. "I just want out."

" _Now_ you do. And what of you?"

The query is directed at Vulpes. The frumentarius says nothing, but glances sideways at the courier to gauge her curiosity in his answer. But he does not get the opportunity to formulate a reply.

"You came here chasing a girl?" the nightkin emits that same strange chuckle as before. "And a girl chasing the Sierra Madre no less. You're an even greater fool than she is."

"Never mind that," the woman interjects before Vulpes' pride gets the better of him and he divulges more motivations than he should in the service of his own dignity. "We're going to need to have a chat, you and I," she tells 'God' and Vulpes deduces that he is not invited. Very well. The better to keep her happy.

Vulpes doesn't know quite what to make of the nightkin's new name, but at heart he is a man of logic. He tells himself that if Caesar, dying of a clouded mind, can call himself the Son of Mars, just about every title in this world is on the table, ripe for the taking. His own certainly was.

He tries to remain dispassionate to the relief that floods his system like a forbidden chemical when the key clinks in the lock and the cell door swings open.

* * *

Not meeting another walking corpse yet makes Boone more than a little paranoid as he sprints from doorway to doorway, skidding down corridors and avoiding courtyards, but the creeps seem to prefer the great outdoors. Or maybe they just feed on the red stuff floating in the air and sponging the walls. He's not jealous of their diet, even if he's already counting and recounting his rations.

He can't see any of them when he finally makes it to a decent vantage point; winded from the fog and the stairs as he crosses the threshold. He can't see much of anything, but maybe that's because he's not looking. He looks right, sees the same old, same old: moldy bed, nightstand with the drawers gutted and scattered across the floor, charred bones, blackened soot… But something pricks at him just before he takes that first out onto the balcony, but it's already been taken and it hasn't gone unnoticed.

"Ah," a suave, smooth voice says from somewhere beside him, "aren't the trees lovely this time of year, all blooming and green…"

Boone turns around to find of all things, a ghoul in shades and a bow-tie, puffing away on a cigar perched in a ragged red velvet armchair - _not more of that damn color_ -as if he didn't have a care in this screwed up city. The rot on his face matched the rot on the walls.

"Look," the sniper replies gruffly, "I don't have a damn clue what you're talking about."

"Of course you don't." The ghoul flicks ash from the tip of his cigar off of the side of the balcony. "So why don't you sit yourself down and let's have us a chat, shall we?"

* * *

"I will see myself out," says the so-called God scathingly once Stella's little talk with him concludes. Aware of the obvious eavesdropper, she still hadn't mentioned about the linked collars, but so far she hadn't needed to. Better to have a secret weapon up her sleeve. "Since the two of you seem to have so much to discuss."

As the station door swings shut, Vulpes reaches out in request for the rifle and earns the courier taking a step back. He inclines his head in the direction the dual-souled nightkin had departed. "If I may…?"

"You may not," she says squarely. "We need him." She pauses, considering, knowing that she has to do this right, has to make this clear, and then raises her weapon to aim at the frumentarius's chest.

His expression transforms from something sporting into something ugly but he says nothing, waiting.

"We don't need you," Stella tells him, hoping that her voice will not betray the barefaced lie, praying that he can't see that the collars link them all.

"You're acting very strangely for someone so eager to preserve my life only moments ago," he observes mildly.

"I told you maybe I wanted to just do it myself. So you'd better give me a damn good reason not to do it here and now," she adds, knowing that any answer he gives will be sufficient and again hoping he doesn't.

"Do it?" he repeats, still infuriatingly mild of manner. "You mean shoot me. Euphemisms are quite unnecessary, really. Might I ask why?"

"You act like I didn't see your pretty piece of work at Nipton. And I saw you too."

Vulpes shrugs. "You saw what you wanted to see, and more likely what you were instructed to see. Didn't you?" He pauses, but she doesn't think he really wanted an answer. "I don't want to kill you," he offers, somehow making it sound as if there was little doubt that he can. "You are very…" his eyes rake over her, "valuable. To my lord. I will not pretend otherwise. Propping up your corpse and hiding behind it would hardly grant us access to Mr. House."

Smiling, he invites her to share his good humor. She does not. "I've been meaning to ask you," she drawls, consciously contemptuous. "How does it feel to be the one wearing a collar for a change?"

The reaction he gives her is as opaque as a mask and unfortunately just as pretty, and his answer matches:

"It doesn't make me feel anything," he tells her and again she questions his true talent as a so-called spy because it obviously must make him feel something. But she decides maybe that was what she was looking for, and she lowers her rifle.

* * *

 _Elijah didn't activate Dean's collar, for the curious. As always, feedback is extremely appreciated! It really is the best._


	6. Some Kind of Evil

**6: Some Kind of Evil  
**

There is no dawn or day in this ghost town, Stella notes when she begins to feel that old familiar ache in the backs of her knees, but then there is no night either. No sun and no stars, and none of the distinct dangers that the light and lack thereof awaken in the Mojave.

There is more than a fair share of danger here, although they've managed to keep it at bay for the most part: skirting the borders of courtyards, darting from doorway to doorway, taking shelter in the flickering false light of the voiceless silhouettes that hover above fountains long since drained of their waters. And when the creatures in the crimson fog do make themselves known, she follows the time old tradition of shooting first, running away second.

The devil in Stella's shadow voices no objections to this strategy. But then he still wasn't the one holding the gun and he wouldn't be any time soon. Any time ever. In fact, he doesn't voice much of anything at all, which was oddly pleasant, until she drops down onto the clammy floor of a shattered apartment and she might as well have dropped dead, the way her knees buckle and her neck snaps back with exhaustion to tip her head against the door frame, and he says:

"Why are we stopping?"

"I'm out of breath," she replies, "and I'm tired. This has been a rather exhausting experience, if you hadn't noticed."

"Did that thing around your wrist tell you that," he sneers down at her Pip-Boy, "or did you figure that out for yourself?"

"Maybe you should have gone back to the fountain with God," is her muttered reply, but she means for him to hear it. "You two have so much in common."

He paces the length of the narrow room like a caged animal. She watches him through heavy, half-lidded eyes although she's feeling anything but in the mood. "Perhaps I should. I have the sense that both you and the abomination know something I do not."

"And what could possibly be unknown to the greatest of Caesar's frumentarii?" He says nothing, only flicks blue eyes briefly in her direction and sniffs audibly. She prepares to take a deep breath, bracing herself for the scarlet fire to course down her throat with the oxygen, and closes her eyes. When she opens them again, he is watching her and she meets his gaze with confidence. "You'll stick around."

"Is that so?"

"It is so," she says, "because propping up my corpse and hiding behind it won't get you into the Lucky 38." She smiles darkly. "As you said."

"As I said," he acknowledges and she wonders where all of his good humor went.

She nods. "So you'll stick around," she says again.

He won't sit still, even though she wishes he would. Paces, antsy like a soldier during a lull in the crossfire, and she tries not to remember Boone. When he isn't looking, she slides her right leg out across the rotting floor as if to stretch, feels the cool metal of her rifle brush her leg, and keeps it there.

"You ran away," he observes and it seems to come from out of the blue, or would've if she hadn't been thinking the same all this time. "From the Fort," he clarifies as if to make certain. "From the Mojave."

 _From Mr. House._ "I do that sometimes."

"Why?" he asks and he sounds genuinely confused, until she remembers that that's how he probably wants to sound. "I… We invited you. We granted you an audience with Caesar himself where he commissioned you to do work in his service. We gave you the opportunity to take vengeance on a man who meant to kill you. Twice."

Finally he sits, perches on the edge of a metal bed with no mattress, and yet that puts her on more edge than before. She hooks her ankle around the barrel of her rifle, drags it closer. "You summoned me," she corrects. "You basically frogmarched me up the hill to Caesar's tent, not you personally, mind," she adds to be fair although she doesn't know why she bothers. "You're far too high and mighty for that. You strong-armed me into doing your dirty work under that hill, again, not you personally." She doesn't know why she keeps doing that.

"You obliterated a bunker of dangerous unknown technology that Mars only knows what House would have done with."

Looking up at him, she is careful to keep a tongue as forked as his own between her teeth. "I did. And you should be grateful."

"And, as I hinted at," he replies, looking down his nose at her, "you should be grateful that we allowed you to dispense justice upon the infiltrator."

"If anyone should be counting their blessings that you gave 'em to me to kill, it's that goddamned son of a bitch Benny," she snaps. "Strung up on a cross doesn't make my top ten of how to go. Mine or anybody else's."

"Yet you could have permitted it to happen to him. But we gave you the choice."

She laughs bleakly, eying the tension in his calves, the ripple of muscle tone through the thin material of the jumpsuit. Even when relaxed, he's not really. "Was that your bright idea?"

"Yes."

Her lips press together, airtight. "Why?"

He shrugs. "It was a test," he explains dispassionately. "Like everything else."

Mouth slightly ajar, she pushes the tip of her tongue against the dagger of one of her canines: a sharp little pinprick that recalls her to action. Rising, she keeps the gun close, even as she walks to the window and turns her back on the monster that doesn't have the sense to get under the bed. "You're some kind of evil," she says, as cool as he was about his little test, "you know that?"

Even if he answered, she doubts that she'd listen. Half-turned away, half-turned back, her fingers find old habits: streamlining a lock of pale hair between forefinger and thumb. She means to tug twice at the end, like she's turning on and off one of those pre-war lamps with the beaded cord, but she only tugs once and comes away with three inches of crackling carotene in her hand. Her breath catches at the sight of the hank of fool's gold colored threads in pinched in her fingers, brittle as her mood, and she tries not to let the green in her eyes drown in her own damn foolishness. Course her hair was fried. Course it was gonna fall apart in her hands like everything else.

And course he's still watching her, waiting to watch her fall apart too.

"I'm hungry," she says and she goes to the broken doorway, not looking to see if he still shadows her. She knows he is.

* * *

There are no trees so far as Boone can tell, looking across the rooftops. All the more reason to think this ghoul in the stupid suit's gone senile. Or just has a stupid sense of humor. Either way, he doesn't want to sit down.

"Look, it looks like you've been here a while. If you could just tell me if you've seen a—"

Faster than he can track, there's a pistol trained on him and a trigger cocked. No room for negotiation. "Sit," he's told and Boone does what he's told.

The chair, deceiving as it is, ain't so comfortable. The ghoul doesn't seem to care much for his comfort though, although he does pocket the holdout. Somehow that doesn't make Boone feel any better.

"The Sierra Madre," the ghoul says, sighing out smoke. "Famous beauty. Is she the one who invited you here?"

Shifting uncomfortably, Boone replies, "Where I come from, we know better than to trust strange women on the radio."

"Yet here you are," his host observes. "At least you're still breathing, I suppose."

"Least that," Boone echoes gruffly. His mind aches dully with the effort of trying to get a rid on the situation, the toxic air making so much static so to speak.

"By the way, don't get up or make any sudden motions; the cushion on that chair is just for show," the ghoul advises, voice a lackadaisical drawl. "Get up without my permission and I'll blow you sky high. Just you watch."

"I'll take it under advisement," he mutters. "Look, I'm looking for a girl, a courier—"

The ghoul chuckles and it does little to brighten the mood. "Aren't we all? Aren't we all?" He strikes a match. "So," he says between cigarette, smoke, and broken teeth, "let's keep this sweet and polite, and finish our conversation with no misunderstandings."

"Finish? I wasn't aware we'd even gotten started."

"Sweet and polite," the ghoul reminds him and Boone wonders if the shades are worth killing the walking dead man over. Probably couldn't get the stink of rot off of the metal with spit shine alone, and there isn't much that stands for soap in these parts.

"I can read the writing on the wall, or rather the collar around your neck," he continues, "and I've been around these parts long enough to know that if old Elijah is up to old tricks, it's only a matter of time before he tries putting me through my paces along with you."

"Elijah?" Boone tries the name out and it brings the familiar taste of bitter anger out in his mouth. "He Legion?"

"Hardly. There's only one of him, so far as I know," and Boone guesses that this guy's never made it out to the Mojave.

"Look, pal—"

"Dean. Dean Domino."

"Alright, Dean" Boone tries to be reasonable, tries not to squirm in his seat, knowing that the deck isn't stacked in his favor, "this ain't my fight. I didn't come here to play treasure hunter. I just want to get this girl back to the Mojave, and if you don't know where the hell she is…"

"Oh, do get up." Pinching his cigarette between his teeth, Dean shakes his head. "That old rig hasn't worked in ages and you're antsier than a gambler who's misplaced his marker. A good thing you're no demolition man."

Annoyance bubbles in his throat and tugs at his trigger finger. "A real good thing," Boone mutters and gets up from the sunken chair, wondering if the stink of mildew will stick along for the ride. Makes him wonder how long that ghoul's been wearing that suit around.

The ghoul in the tuxedo hums a melody Boone doesn't know, reaches into his suit's pocket for a lighter, and flicks on a flame. "Pity…"

"What?" Boone turns back and looks at the smooth-talking ghoul for some explanation. The one he gets makes zero sense:

"Pity Father Elijah didn't activate my bow tie, so to speak," is the reply, but even Boone doesn't believe it. He's no Stella when it comes to being a people-person, but the Mojave doesn't let many idiots get as old as he feels. "I'm almost insulted."

"That so?" the sniper remarks with a skepticism learned from the Mojave.

"Oh, yes," Dean Domino says, half in this world and half someplace else, "and pity it's you."

"Were you hoping for somebody else?"

"I'm quite indifferent, but no." He sighs. "You were not what I was hoping for."

Boone reads that as a good thing. "Sorry to disappoint you."

"No, no," Dean flaps one emancipated hand at him as if sending off the president of the NC-fucking-R. "I've had, oh, two hundred years, to accustom myself. It won't kill me to wait a little longer." He laughs brightly and it makes Boone's fingers twitch trigger-ready. "Regardless, go off and look for your messenger-girl, if she's here. I do hope you find her."

"I'm honestly hoping the opposite," the sniper mutters and earns Dean raising what remains of his eyebrows. Embarrassed somewhat, he tries to explain. "Between what you've told me and what I've picked up looking around myself, I'd rather she was just about any other place."

"Better here than dead, certainly? There aren't many things worse than death, death being so terribly permanent."

Boone tries not to think even as he says, "I can think of a few."

"So I can imagine." Blowing smoke rings out into the red cloud, eyes masked by shades that Boone misses wearing himself, Dean flicks ash out off onto the rooftop. "Pity," he repeats a third time, "but she probably wouldn't survive anyway." Then, so quietly Boone barely heard him: "Chin up, old sport. There's always next time."

* * *

 _You're some kind of evil. You know that?_

She is perched on the balls of her feet like a gecko beside one of those infuriatingly overpriced machines, side panel popped off, up to her shoulders in gears when Vulpes hears the same name hiss past her teeth like a blessing. Or a curse. And this time he cannot resist needling her on the pretext of reconnaissance he already suspects.

"Who is Boone?" he asks her innocently enough although he has a very good hypothesis. But he wants to see what she gives him for the inquiry.

She gives him a tell, as those degenerates, those gamblers, name it: she fishes out one grimy hand and brushes its fingers across an already filthy face; rust streaks a smear like a burn across the bridge of her nose. There is the smallest of bumps adorning it, he notices with amusement: she bears a Roman nose, whether she knows it or not. Whether she likes it or not. "No one."

"You whisper his name an awful lot for him to be no one."

Jimmying her hand further into the machine, she twists and turns her wrist until something clicks and a package announces its arrival, red plastic crinkling in the compartment below. He watches as she wastes no time in snatching up her prize and spins around, green eyes darting both greedily and guiltily, searching for anyone coming from behind to take her hard-earned work. His mouth twitches into a half-smirk at the quirks of those living in the chaos beyond the Legion's borders.

The panel slams shut and she stands up, packet held tightly in one hand. "None of your goddamned business who he is," she says and he isn't sure if she is telling him or the poker chip half-mooned beneath the vending machine's foot.

"Is he a brother?" Vulpes calls casually after her when she turns to move out and she stops, standing stiffly in an archway. "Not a son, certainly. A lover then?" He yawns. "No doubt murdered viciously by the Legion."

"Something like that," he thinks he hears her murmur before she starts walking.

He silently counts her four steps, not budging a foot himself, before he speaks again.. "Are you praying for his safety or for yours?"

Her feet stall. "That makes no sense."

"Do you want him to rescue you?" he asks her, deliberately provocative, deliberately not looking at her. "Or do you want to do the rescuing? It might be a pleasurable change from what I can imagine must be the norm…"

Her hands fists his already torn collar; long, would-be elegant fingers resorting to violence, but his own have done the same so many times over. More amused than threatened, he lets her jerk him close, Roman noses inches apart, lips pulled back and teeth bared. What a strange tableau they must make to any observer, but there are none. He wonders for one brief odd moment if she is about to kiss him or bite him. Or both.

"I didn't ask for this," she tells him and he isn't sure what she means. What she is referring to. Does she mean the extended stay in this poisoned city and the collar around her throat, or just the pleasure of his company? The summons to Caesar's will or that she was marked by Mr. House in the first place? The bullets to the skull or the commission to deliver a package she did not understand the significance of?

It makes the back of his skull throb, how much he knows of this profligate woman.

Or does she just mean the consignment of her birth to roam the wasteland? Because it is a wasteland; all of it. They call this place the Mojave Wasteland, he knows, but there is simply one wasteland after another, stretching from one sea to the other, and there are worse wastelands, he knows, where a man in a golden mask reigns supreme.

He does not know what answer he should give, what answer she would desire. He does know, however, that he should not bait her further, at least not now. As he meets her eyes, hers narrow in response, expecting mockery, expecting cruelty. It is Vulpes' gift, to be the very thing they do not expect.

"Nor did I," he says and he isn't sure what he means either. But her fingers loosen in the material of his jumpsuit and they look long and hard at each other before she lets go.

 _You're some kind of evil. You know that?_


	7. Angel of Swift Death

**7: Angel of Swift Death**

" _Can_ _'_ _t you just smell that air? Oh my God, just smell that air!_ _"_

 _Her palms are cracked open like jagged fault lines and when her mouth opens to reply her lips crack with them. The lake the ranger on the road had mentioned has been dried up for decades, centuries maybe, and her throat burns._

 _Scratched-up eyeglasses snapped in two, lenses popped out and frames dangling off of their temples like desert flowers snapped off of their stems, the man giggles a mad laugh, took a great big whiff of the air, and rushes madly off into the distance before Stella can shout a word of warning about the gangsters all along the interstate, jacket just another speck of blue in a limitless sky._

 _She stands still, not a wise move in the Mojave, but she smells the air. She already stumbled into a radioactive pit once, just outside of Prim, and chewed down half of her stash of Rad-X in a mad panic. The powder lingers in the far corners of her mouth, scratched into the grooves of her teeth, and she doesn_ _'_ _t look forward to repeating that experience._

 _The air smells like smoke, but she hasn_ _'_ _t lit a cigarette since she woke up in the Doc_ _'_ _s place. She doesn_ _'_ _t know if she ever has. She remembers what the other ranger, the one on the roof, said, and she wakes slowly toward the buildings in the near distance. Where there_ _'_ _s smoke_ _…_

 _The air smells like death, like the charred furniture and human limbs in the Bison Steve in Prim, like her upper arm when the idiot with the flamer got too close. She wants to stop, she wants to remember what the sniper said -_ _"_ _I want your eyes and ears, not your life_ _"_ _-but she keeps going. If somebody takes your eyes and ears, how much life is left?_

 _If somebody puts two bullets into your skull, takes your life but doesn_ _'_ _t quite finish the job, how much life is left?_

 _The smoke rises up in plumes into the limitless sky and it rises from everything: fences, rooftops, bodies piled upon bodies_ _…_ _she doesn_ _'_ _t look too closely at those. She_ _'_ _s seen bodies before: the Bison Steve, crushed into the abandoned cars all along the highway, the headless couple in the sheriff_ _'_ _s shack. She_ _'_ _s seen the dead before and she_ _'_ _s learned to turn a blind eye._

 _It_ _'_ _s the dying that are harder to ignore. Especially when they_ _'_ _re strung up on crosses, groaning._

 _First one. She can_ _'_ _t cut him down. Even if he_ _'_ _d survive the drop, she doesn_ _'_ _t have the time. She needs to hightail it back to the outpost, bargain for an armed escort to Novac or someplace else, anyplace else, maybe she should_ _'_ _ve just stayed put in Goodsprings with Ringo and Sunny, living a good life in a good house with a good man_ _…_

 _He_ _'_ _s asking her a_ _'_ _would you kindly_ _'_ _, this first one; even if his mouth is nailed shut with the pain, his eyes speak aplenty. She answers with a gunshot and reads his death rattle as a thank you._

 _Second one. The town is silent save for the crackle of flames and the moans of the dying, but she can feel that when she moves, shadows move with her. She can_ _'_ _t cut this one down either, so she delivers shotgun mercy: a poor second best. There isn_ _'_ _t much left of his upper body._

 _There is a dog growling at the back of her mind, or maybe just back behind her. The bullets in her head gifted her with phantom sounds along with a clean slate._

 _Not all that clean; the should_ _'_ _ve-been-erased chalk marks keep creeping up on her._

 _Third one. She wonders if he_ _'_ _d rather be with his buddies in sweet oblivion anyway. Not that she knows what comes after, even with her brush with the after-this as close as it was._

 _She pushes a few more rounds into her gun, mouths a quick_ _'_ _sorry_ _'_ _to the poor gangster up on the cross as he watches her prep, lifts the barrel, and actually feels bad about this one. For making him watch her reload and wait._

 _Intervention in the form of cold, hard fingers coiled around her wrist. She_ _'_ _d have almost called it divine, had it been anybody else. She turns to look at who_ _'_ _s gonna try and stop her, meets black goggles as cold and hard as the hand._

 _A twitch of an eyebrow and a twitch of the lips invites her to determine who really deserves this shell more and she_ _'_ _s got to admit that it_ _'_ _s a tough decision with three worthy candidates._

 _She decides that the hurter isn_ _'_ _t gonna steal the mercy for the hurt. But he doesn_ _'_ _t stop her and she pulls the trigger. Later, she wonders if she didn_ _'_ _t blow the wrong man away after all._

* * *

They move from doorway to fountain, fountain to doorway, doorway to stairs, stairs to rooftop, onward without relent to a destination he knows not. As she puts both of them through their paces, Vulpes wonders when her sniper will make his entrance. He theorizes that it will be inevitable; he saw the dog's body in the trap. If Vulpes is not dead and she is not dead, why should he be?

He wonders if they are dead, bodies buried in a bunker. Is it too cowardly to hope?

The option to dangle another hint of his knowledge of her NCR dog does not go unconsidered. It would be a clever ploy to extract information about the current situation from the courier. Under normal circumstances.

These are not normal circumstances.

Vulpes prides himself on his logic, his deductive skills, his ability to put pieces that appear utterly unrelated together and observe a greater meaning where plebeian profligates cannot. But that does not mean that he then takes that picture for truth -particularly not when so many pieces are obtained by the crack of a whip. His greatest skill rests in the means of contrasting intelligence to the greater world at hand; it is for that reason that he takes on the guise of "Mr. Fox" with such frequency. Even he cannot manipulate a world he does not know.

This is a world he does not know.

Any token fact she might offer him in exchange for her sniper's status would be complete fabrication. He cannot fathom why it would be otherwise. More than that, the prospect of another, more familiar ally would lower Vulpes' value as a companion. It is easiest to watch and protect her under the guise of being such.

Never mind that that despite his best attempts at salvaging a weapon, she still has the only gun.

So he keeps both eyes open for her sniper. Ideally he will be able to cut the dog down before she knows any better... and without suspecting the means of his tragic demise.

"I assume the collars are a gift of the 'master' that abomination spoke of," he says conversationally to her as she tinkers with one of the holograms. Always tinkering with things. He should not be surprised. People generally prefer to do what they are talented at.

He watches as the flickering gambler wearing a pre-war suit like a second skin static-jumps from pose to pose. "Not so?"

"You ask a lot of questions," she mutters, annoyance and a lock-pick between her teeth.

"Can you fault me?"

"For sounding like a seven year old?"

"I thought you wouldn't have children," he comments. They step away from the monument to greed. Its inhabitant waves nonchalantly at their departure.

She stiffens. He continues. "Perhaps I was mistaken and you are of an age."

"What's that supposed to mean?"

"Nothing," he says. "Do you have children?"

"No," she answers finally and his interest is piqued. She had to think about it. Lying.

Or she doesn't know.

Her eyes are fixed on the device clamped around her wrist, not him, eyes tracing a pattern he cannot see.

She called him a child. He has pretended to seem tame in an effort to tame her.

He is not a child. Nor is he tame.

"Who are you looking for?" he demands.

She doesn't answer. He sees the rifle slung over her shoulder. Two of his strides make up for three of hers and his hand is locked around her forearm, just above the machine, in an instant.

"You didn't wander into that police station by chance," he tells her when her green eyes dart up to meet his. "Who are you tracking now?"

"You're hurting my arm," she says.

"Am I?" he asks and squeezes tighter.

"Maybe you don't understand."

"Oh, I do." Tighter still.

A trigger cocks. He looks down, sees the 10 millimeter pistol pinched between them, barrel less than an inch from his abdomen. He looks up to meet hard eyes. "No, I don't think so," she tells him. "I don't like being hurt."

"Where did you get that?" He doesn't budge.

Neither does she. "You've never had to look for anything in your life, have you? Anything important. Guns. Food."

"I found you."

"I know," she agrees wearily. "I wish to God you hadn't."

His fingers tighten a fraction more. There is a reason she has not shot him before and there is a reason she will not shoot him now and he wants to know what it is. A calculated amused twitch of his upper lip dares her to pull the trigger.

For a moment, it looks like she will and he almost relishes it.

Behind them, the holographic gambler smiles and waves one final time before winking out.

* * *

 _"Go home, Boone. Just go home."_

Boone follows the new light. The glow emanates from a distant courtyard, pale, flickering, turns the air pansy purple. Eerie pretty or pretty eery, but that's not what interests him about it. He had shut his eyes to empty skies only seconds before, letting himself have one moment of oblivion because he wasn't about to let himself sleep, and something else had woken up in the meantime.

Someone had woken something up.

He follows whatever it is that lights up the sky like the Strip he stole his girl from, tumbling her onto a bed made up with sheets he was ashamed of. _"Not good enough for you."_

 _"S'okay,"_ she had murmured in that throaty voice and wound her arms lazily around his neck. _"You're good enough for me."_

He shakes off memories like a pine tree shivering off its snow-pack up near Jacobstown and keeps to the rooftops and their domain of sliding tiles and rickety construction beams, trembling beneath his boots. A rucksack dangles between his shoulder blades and he scoops up anything else useful that happens across his path, like the binoculars dangling from a bent nail smashed-in against the scaffolding. Can always drop it later. Not sure if he'll be back to pick it up if he needs it. When he needs it.

And he needs it soon. No easy way down from the catwalks and he's of no use to nobody if he leaps down and cracks a skull, his skull, so about two alleyways and a main street over, three stories up, he drops the rucksack against the crenelations of an old world hotel, sprawls flat across the roof, props himself up on his elbows. Binoculars zoom in and that's when he sees her.

She's alive. Oxygen chokes through his throat before he widens his focus.

She's not alone.

Boone doesn't know the man with the dark hair and the sinewy build but he knows the way he walks. He knows the way his hand lashes out to lock around her wrist. He knows the way he snaps her entire body around to face him, the way his entire face screws up in a snarl.

And he knows the way Stella's face wipes clean blank, so totally empty that he knows that it's a big fat lie.

 _"Go home, Boone."_

He sees her wrist pinch red then purple between the bastard's fingers. He sees the flesh of her neck bulge between the ragged tendrils of her ponytail and the metal around her throat.

He sees another girl tripping over a ripped hem, dark hair waterfalling over her cheekbones and the collar, clutching at a round little belly that betrays her. Betrays them both.

 _"Just go home."_

He wasn't supposed to remember. But here it was. And there's his pistol, tight in his grip. When did it get there? When did he drop the binoculars? When did he take aim?

When's he gonna take the shot?

He doesn't have it. Least not the shot he wants. It's a damn pistol and it's that distance, that long long distance, two alleys and a street over, three stories up.

He might hit the bastard. Smash a round through his sneering skull.

He's not that good.

He might hit them both. Graze her cheek, get his temple.

He's still not that good.

He might just hit her.

His own words about wanting her anywhere but here come up swinging from where he thought he punched them down. Some things worse than death, he had said, as if he knows.

He doesn't know.

His finger itches on the trigger, steady on the shadows in the blue light. Air hisses between his teeth like it did all those months ago. Coming up on a year.

He doesn't want an anniversary.

And then when he's finally lined it all up, the right shot and everything, the light goes out.

* * *

The courtyard turns cold when the hologram dissolves into nothing but Stella tells herself it's all in her mind. This is here, she insists, glaring staunchly back into the ice of the Legion spy's eyes. This is real.

"Let go," she says between her teeth. Back in the Mojave, back with somebody else, she would've started a countdown, would've smirked the smile that scares the shit out of people, that Cass calls 'smiling like you know the exact moment when the world's gonna end. Again.'

He smiles that smile sometimes. Not today. "Who are you looking for?" he says and the tone of his voice makes a demand a very dangerous request. "Who is the Old Man?"

"I don't know," she chokes out and she thinks she sees something in the outer darkness behind him.

He smiles a smile of disappointment. "Stella, Stella," he chides, singsong, and she hadn't realized he knew her name. "I've been meaning to ask," he continues casually, "where's that special little chip of yours?"

She un-cocks and re-cocks the trigger, the answer to that question frightening her more than he can. But she's not going to shoot him. She can't shoot him.

His smile doesn't fade and neither does her fear until his expression goes totally, unexpectedly blank.

It's only later that she hears the thunk.

Crumpling forward, his forehead knocks against her shoulder, sticky wet blood blossoming in the crown of his head and pooling in the space between them. Her eyes widen and her arms automatically stretch out to catch him.

Her heart races: a thump-thump countdown to the moment when her head is supposed to explode.

* * *

 _guest reviewer: Thank you!_

 _Feedback super-appreciated. I'm going to have to return to my Dragon Age fic to finish up the next chapter of it, but then I will be back. A big thank you to all of my reviewers/story follows/favorites!  
_


	8. I Know My Value

**8: I Know My Value**

It takes three short, staggering breaths for Stella to realize that she's still alive. Which means that the Legion spy slumped against her chest is still alive too.

Neither of them will be alive for long if she doesn't move.

She doesn't know where the blow came from -the courtyard is as deserted as a church in the Mojave -but there's no way in hell that she's sticking around for an encore.

Even stripped of his armor and that stupid dog's head hood, Inculta is much heavier than she is. Slapping his shoulder again and again, over and over, she hisses, "Get up, you idiot! Get up, bastard! You are not getting out of this this easy. Come on!"

He's not dead, even if there's a hole in his head, and she doesn't know yet if there even is one. "Come on!" she screeches into his ear and smacks his arm one more time with the butt of the pistol she still clings onto, knuckles bleached with survival instinct.

His neck snaps back, eyes open but rolling back. She catches his head, cupping blood-soaked hair. Groaning and mumbling, it's probably the first time the big bad Vulpes Inculta has found himself without words.

"Come _on_ ," she repeats, groaning a little herself with holding them both up. Shoulders, neck, and knuckles cracking like a dry storm, she shuffles his weight, loops his arm around her shoulders, tries to lever his ankles out from under him.

"We are going," she grunts, scrapes forward across the broken pavement with her burden.

"We are going," she repeats, sets her sights on a door mostly intact.

"We are going." Stella kicks the door open, hinges nails-on-chalkboard complaining, and throws the both of them through it.

He hits the floor harder than she does and she hits it hard: panting, aching, shaking. Her eyes plead closure, and it's all she can do to roll over onto her back like a radroach and kick the door shut again. "We are gone."

Door's not gonna hold them. Who knows if the ghost people open doors, but she's pretty sure they've got thumbs.

Staggering to her feet like a broken marionette, she trips right and throws her weight against an empty bookshelf, slamming her shoulder mindlessly into its side until it creaks into its new role as a barricade. Slapping her palm twice against the terra cotta wall, she heaves her relief at making it this far in three heavy gusts, three heavy gusts of expelled adrenaline, and falls flat onto her ass, spine curving to meet the floor.

Job's not over.

Rolling back over, she heaves herself up onto her elbows and arm-crawls to the Legion spy's side. Looking through bleary-eyes, she suspects a medical quandary: does she prop his head up to keep his airway clear or does she keep his chin tucked to take a better look at the back of his head? _Gannon, where are you?_

She pulls him onto his side, facing her. His nose turns like a weather-vane to the floor and she pushes apart his cropped hair to take a look. No hole, no bullet, just a graze and God are they lucky for it. Bleeding like a stuck brahmin though, so she rips off the left sleeve of her jumpsuit and balls it up beneath his head when she turns him back belly-up; was already torn at the shoulder, so no harm, no foul.

His eyes won't focus, not even when she pries them open between thumb and index finger like clams, and she wonders if he's brain dead. Would be awful convenient, if not for the fact she'd have to sit around and play nanny to a breathing corpse just to keep her own blood pumping. Least she wouldn't have to talk to him.

Doesn't want to touch him more than she's got to -not because touching him is unpleasant, but because it's not as unpleasant as it should be -so she puts two fingers to his jugular to take a pulse and he jerks like she's a live electric charge, moaning in Latin. She thinks it's Latin. Not brain dead then.

Probably just a concussion, she thinks, borrowing something she heard one of the Followers say once. Not that she hangs with them. Doesn't like them, really. No obvious ulterior motives but there's got to be some somewhere…

No time for that shit. No time for a concussion either.

She twirls a syringe between her fingers like a dart. She knows the Legion's party stance on stims; the guard at the gate read her the riot act when he saw her stash. Bitchy to the nines, she'd told him her grand ambition is to find a beach, get high, and sink into the sand.

Almost a lie.

Stab the needle in, push the piston, yank it all out. Pinprick will close up before he can find a mirror to check. But she doesn't. _What if I need it later?_

Except she needs it now. So does the poor bastard wearing collar seventeen, whoever that is. So she stabs the spy in the jugular and half-wishes the tip were just a little bit bigger as she pushes the syringe. Pulling the needle free, she presses a thumb to the injection site and looks for a place to dispose of the evidence.

Blue eyes open a half-second too soon. No good deed.

* * *

The gunshot cracks out in the new dark, rippling like thunder in the hazy silence. A sound that shouldn't be so familiar, and since it is, it doesn't sit well in Boone's gut.

It recalls midnight initiation to First Recon, recalls standing headlights still, fists screwed up, a glass of cold water freezing up his scalp seconds before his bunk-mate's supposed to knock it off his head with one shot and one shot only. Dumbest ritual ever, given that the NCR needs every man it can get its hands on.

But nobody turns no one into the brass the next morning.

It recalls his first mission out in the desert that's Republic land fair and square, out where there used to be a river and there used to be a university. Nobody's got time for school now, least of all the raiders who set up a nice little drugs and whoring ring in those parts.

They aren't in those parts anymore. Or any parts.

It recalls a lot of things, few of them pleasant. This might be down there with the bottom three.

Boone doesn't remember taking the shot.

He trembles with adrenaline that doesn't feel earned. Unlocking the pistol's cartridge, he remembers that he never counted the bullets to begin with. Checking his hands for residue, he finds them so filthy that they tell him nothing. He looks back out to the view where the light used to be and he sees nothing.

He doesn't remember taking the shot.

But then he didn't remember dropping the binoculars. He didn't remember aiming the gun in the first place. And it isn't the first time he's taken a shot without thinking. Sometimes it's easier that way. Unwillingly, he remembers smoke rising from the Springs and the line of head-shots tricking through the ravine. More willingly, he remembers taking aim at the shadowy figure beside the girl with the blonde hair tucked into the borrowed red beret. He hadn't thought then. Why should this have been any different?

But he still doesn't remember taking the shot.

But who else could it have been? Who else with a gun in this damned-to-hell city has an interest in shooting the Legion bastard bossing around the girl with the blonde hair?

He hopes to God he didn't miss.

* * *

Vulpes is confused. His head hurts, but for more reasons than uncertainty.

His heartbeat is pumping faster than it should be; not dramatic, but a determinable difference. She's looking guilty, guilty, guilty, guilty, missing a sleeve and missing her usual composure. When he sees the needle in her hand, he knows why.

Her fingers are frozen at his throat. He reaches up, contemplates snapping them, but merely brushes them aside and replaces them with his own. Her hand folds back into her lap like a broc flower curling into itself from the night sky. He feels out the tiny wound and holds very still.

"You injected me," he says, voice very still as well, deceptively so.

"I did," she answers quietly, but her muted tone should not be mistaken for weakness just as his should not be confused for calm. She is unflinching, unyielding.

"With a stimulant," he clarifies just so he can ascertain exactly what sin she must pay for.

"Why don't you feel out the back of your head?." He does, sitting up and steadying a spinning world. His hair feels questionably sticky and there is a sizable lump, just barely scabbing over. "I saved your life."

Did she now? He communicates his skepticism. She repeats herself. His confusion lingers. Why?

She keeps insisting that she saved his life; strange, especially after she kept threatening to end it. This goes on for some time.

"Caesar saved your life," she says and that comes from out of nowhere too. "Your boss wanted you up on a cross for insubordination. The Son of Mars stepped in and played a hand of divine intervention. He told me. Bet you didn't yell at him for that."

"You asked him," he corrects, not questions, ignoring her last sentence, and when her green eyes give a telltale flick, he is pleased by the revelation. "You asked him about me. But you don't strike me as a very curious courier. Why?"

"Maybe you don't know what kind of courier I am."

"Perhaps I do not," he says, surprising them both.

She leans back against the wall, folds her arms, hunches her shoulders and tucks her chin in like a lizard nestling against the Mojave dirt. Her eyes don't close. "You weren't like this before," he says abruptly. "You weren't like this with Caesar."

"Maybe I just showed Caesar what he wanted to see," she challenges but it's not much of one.

With a shrug, he remarks, "He wouldn't have cared what you showed him. He wouldn't have cared what he saw. You were the courier that gained an audience with House. You could have been anything and he would have accepted it. A rare gift."

"He seems to like what you are alright." She pauses. "Or at least what he thinks you are. The baddest bad around."

He chuckles, charmed despite himself, despite his anger at her actions. "Aren't I?" Because despite all her previous showmanship, she stabbed the needle of one of her precious stimulants into his chest against his wishes and recalled him to life.

"Maybe. Seems you got a lot of power a lot of fast. And you can't seem to get on without making people miserable. But I got news for you." She extends her legs across the floor and crosses one ankle over the other, like she's trying to lock herself down to something more solid than she is. Interesting. "You can be one bad son of a bitch," she says, "but that doesn't make you worth a cap. You're just another one of my problems."

"An costly problem," he returns. "You might have needed that stimpack for yourself."

"You telling me you wouldn't've done the same, places swapped?"

"Of course I would have," he answers, simple and without sentimentality. "Your life is valuable to the Legion's interests. I do not understand why my life would be valuable to you. We have no personal stake in one another. Do you mean for me to believe you are simply a, what do you name it, good samaritan?" He leisurely runs his eyes over her, noting the tightness at the corners of her mouth, the twist of her fingers in the material of her jumpsuit. "No. I don't think so."

Getting to her feet, she crosses to the sink and turns the knob. Tainted water trickles from the rusted faucet. As she gingerly dabs poison on her face, she says, "I cared about what Caesar saw at the Fort. And I know my value. You don't have to spell it out." She turns off the water with an agonized squeak. "And in case things aren't clear for next time." She turns back with a cleaner face and a dirty smile. "Learn to duck."

"I don't believe you," Vulpes tells her before he thinks to let her believe otherwise. And maybe it is because he says this and it is true that she does not say anything else.

He should be angrier, he thinks as he watches her prowl the premises, opening drawers and peering beneath moldy cushions, looking in a way she claims he cannot. He wants to be angrier. Stimulants are a hallmark of a world most wicked, debase, and corrupt; the individuals that use them lost and fearful of their place in such a madhouse.

Yet she appears neither lost nor fearful. She knows her value.

And yet he does not know his own. She saved his life, as Caesar did once. He understood why then. He does not understand why now.

* * *

 _Stella is clearly not a medicine girl. Her tag skills, if interested, are Repair, Sneak, and Survival._

 _Feedback always super-appreciated!_


	9. Good People Doing Bad Things

**9: Good People Doing Bad Things**

Stella doesn't feel good, letting him believe she saved his life out of moral compunction.

But it does feel kind of good, letting him believe it.

It doesn't make her feel _good_ , this feeling good. It's better than feeling bad and it's better than feeling dead, which is what they'd both be feeling if not for her own self-preservation skills.

But she doesn't like the way his eyes follow her around the room. She doesn't like the haunted domestic scene that the ruined kitchen builds around them. And she doesn't like the strange courtesy with which he asks her, "What do you propose for our next course of action?"

He's still sitting on the floor, as if he doesn't trust a chair from an age he doesn't belong to. _Just a chair_ , but she remembers it's a chair from an era that destroyed itself. Destroyed them too. Stella doesn't expect to make it to forty.

Makes it all the worse that she doesn't know how far she's already made it.

Her fingers are itching to clean out her guns, but she's not taking apart her two best advantages. He may believe she saved his life out of moral compunction, but that doesn't mean it's true and that doesn't mean that he likes the way she went about doing it. He doesn't. He may say that her value to Caesar is behind compare, but that doesn't mean she can believe him. Even if he believes.

He's still waiting for an answer. "I thought you were the renowned strategist."

"I would like to hear your view."

He looks believable. Sounds believable. Doesn't mean she can believe him.

She points to the small mountain of furniture piled against the door. "Someone wants to shoot you -someone _did_ shoot you -which means they probably want to shoot me too."

"Then perhaps we should retire to the upper floor," he proposes, strangely delicate in his suggesting. "If not to recover, then to secure all other entrances." He pauses. "It does not need to be an either/or. In fact, it should not be."

Makes sense. She still makes him walk up the stairs first.

Upstairs, they close all the shutters, the glass in the windows long since shattered. They upend couches, dressers, and coffee tables, stand them up against the windows like soldiers at their posts. The silence disturbs Stella, scrapes up too close to battered sunglasses and the wordless offering of her lighter for his cigarette… She wants him here but she wants him anywhere but…

"I'm curious," says the Legion spy and for once, just once, she is grateful. "You talk of scavenging and how I have no talent for it."

"You call it scavenging," she says from the other end of the bookshelf they lever against the stairwell door, "I call it salvaging," and she brushes a few lost poker chips out from beneath the couch to make her point, "and you suck at it. So?"

"I was wondering what you 'salvaged' at Nipton."

He takes her silence as encouragement. "I know the mayor had a safe and a stash," he continues. "I know you would have searched for both. What did you find, little salvager?"

"This again?" A mad giggle escapes. "Yeah, they were bad. They were bad people doing bad things. But they were trying to stay alive, stuck between two big guys who really didn't give a shit about them personally. People do bad things all the time when they're trying to survive."

She pauses again. "Maybe there were some good people doing bad things there too."

"If they are good people doing bad things," he replies, "can you really call them good? I'm curious," he says again, "why you don't extend the same pardon to the Legion."

Stella looks at him. She doesn't see the absence of a snake-smile because she's so used to seeing it there. "I can imagine you did some pretty bad things, just to stay alive in the Legion," she tells him, "but that doesn't mean I've gotta forgive you. Doesn't mean I should."

The bed, depressed and damp as it is, is calling where he can no longer hold her attention. She's not its only audience. She takes a step in its direction, when:

"One bed," he notes with his old false courtesy.

"Your eyes work," she says with her old false awe.

The snake-smile returns, even if she never noticed it play truant. "I can be a gentleman."

"I'm sure," she says, "especially when I'm on the bed and you're on the floor. Good night."

* * *

The bastard had been smiling ear to ear before the lights went out.

 _The bastard had been smiling ear to ear when Boone had staggered to the hotel door and pounded his fist on the rotten wood. No vacancy. Now there was one. Two, but barely anyone knew. Too shy to talk. But Manny had been smiling ear to ear. Always had a freaky knack for smiling at inappropriate times, things, tragedies. Boone didn't smile, ever, had seen too many things, too many tragedies, too many times. So they made up each other's differences._

 _Andy used to say Boone wore a goofy grin whenever she was with him. Now the crippled ranger doesn't have the guts to meet his eyes, like the rest of this fucked up town. But it's Manny smiling ear to ear that's burned onto the back of Boone's eyelids, grin clouding up his crosshairs in the dusk._

Ear to ear. Can't get it out of his head. He'd like to slit the bastard's throat ear to ear.

Thinking about it.

 _Thinking about it when the door opens and the light goes on. Cliff'd probably shut the power off when he'd turned in for the night, but she turns the light on and he'll notice this about her later, that she turns the light on whenever she enters a room and is just as likely to leave it lit. But he doesn't know this now and he remembers watching all of the Novac people walk yawning into their bedrooms earlier that evening._

 _Thinks it's his comeuppance finally come for him._

 _Hopes._

 _Not going down without a damn good fight. Shop door swings shut; he's got a back slamming into metal hinges, barrel of his rifle across a throat, hands locked on stock and muzzle. Cat-green eyes flash at him just before he realizes that the body he's got locked down against the door is too small, too soft…_

 _Hasn't touched a woman in weeks. Hasn't touched a woman that wasn't his wife in—_

 _He throws himself away from her as if he's been burned, stumbling backward until his ass meets weathered spikes of teeth. "God damn it," he swears and he means it, means it all, God damn it all. "Don't sneak up on people like that."_

 _She's got one hand in a pocket and he doesn't know if she's pulling something out or putting it back. Either way, he's ready. "I opened a door," she says, annoyed. "In what world is that sneaking?"_

 _"My world," he answers, realizes how stupid it sounds only after it's out. "What do you want?"_

 _"Who were you expecting?"_

 _Tries to look at her without really seeing her, even as he's wondering if the Legion would be so damned clever as to send a woman to take out a widower._

 _Probably._

 _"Answering a question with another damned question makes you a cheat."_

 _"Isn't everyone a cheat in this world?"_

 _Bleakness in her tone catches his attention. Strikes a note too close to what his own vocal chords have been playing lately. Makes him take another look at her; it's really a first look. Hollow cheeked and hollow eyed. Pretty; little good that does her out here. Bad things happen to pretty girls in the wasteland; Boone knows this better than just about anybody. On the Strip, where the Chairmen line up beautiful women like dolls on a shelf and the Omertas keep the riffraff satisfied, she would be safer. Carla would have been safer._

 _Damn it._

 _Hollow cheeked and hollow eyed. The weariness in her eyes catches his attention all over again. He wonders what bastard cheated her._

 _"Look," she says with tired eyes and a tired voice. Life comes in pairs, spotters and shooters, and Boone's been cheated out by two and a half by his last figuring. "I get it. I'll come back and ask the daytime guy if he's seen my man."_

 _Something tells him she's not talking about the guy she goes to bed with. More than that: pictures form in his head, of her sneaking up on the bastard, of the bastard sliding his slick grin over her curves, taking advantage of another pretty girl he doesn't want around…_

 _"Look," the words feel torn from the lining of his throat. "Maybe you shouldn't go. Not yet."_

 _Cat eyes try to read his shades. "Are you going to try and kill me again?"_

 _She already knows he's a killer. Good. Simpler. "No. I'm looking for someone I can trust. You're a stranger. That's a start."_

 _"You trust strangers." She doesn't ask; she merely states. She does that a lot, he'll notice._

 _"I said it was a start."_

 _Later, he'll notice other things about her: her two uneven braids, hair pulled over to one side so that uneven bangs sweep over a scar he learns about later, the sunburn across her nose because she refuses to wear a hat that could blindside her from an ambush from behind, the way she flicks a shiny lighter that one of the Boulder City khans will palm her on and off, on and off, over and over again like a nervous tick._

 _Later, he'll get her to the Strip, where she'll be safe, or at least safer, until she decides to stroll on up to another bastard, this one tapping a cigarette against shiny metal railing in the Tops, flicking ash onto the plush carpet._

 _Later, Boone will watch from afar as she, dressed in a floaty pink dress snatched from House's suite, steps forward and offers that same lighter, flicks on another light Boone bets she doesn't know the consequence of._

 _Then Boone will see the bastard in the checkered suit see her, really see her, and Boone won't see what she does next, won't hear what she says to him, but he'll see the bastard in the checkered suit's face change until he's smiling ear to ear too._

He's thinking about all this now because the bastard in the red city had been smiling ear to ear before the lights went out. He's sick of anyone smiling that smile.

* * *

Vulpes does not mean to sleep, but sleep he does. When he wakes, groggy and grudging of his own failing, he reminds himself that Caesar is the Son of Mars and Inculta is only a shadow a new man stepped forward to fill.

When he wakes, he wakes to steps that shake the floor and her voice, but her words are not meant for him. His eyes open to marching boots and dust shaken from its ancient homes. The courier whispers to ghosts, pacing like a caged creature, golden hair a snarl. "I need more time," she pleads with an audience that Vulpes can neither see nor hear, even as he slowly raises his head. "Give me more time."

Back to the wall, she slides to the floor, cornered by an intangible opponent. "Elijah…"

Her eyes meet his and he knows that there will be no more eavesdropping. "The Old Man, I presume?" he prompts her and she looks at him but he cannot be sure if she listens to him.

His head aches but he knows this is critical and he refuses to be diverted from it. He waits, making his refusal to desert the field without reason clear in his silence, until she swipes something from the floor, too quick for him to register what it is, and tosses it into his chest. Catching it by reflex, poker chips clink together in his palm, wrapped in a shred of bloodstained cloth — his blood; he recognizes the sleeve she had torn from her shoulder for his head.

Still heeding the ghost's angry demands -if he concentrates, he can just barely make out the tiny crackling voice emerging from the device at her wrist, but it makes his head hurt more than before -she jerks her thumb to the door and then to the bundle of currency in his grip; he feels his lips twitch in amusement at this strange domesticity. There is something oddly pleasurable in it, even if she stubbornly insists on maintaining her own illusions by ordering him from the room at silent gunpoint.

Disassembling their fortifications, kicking open the shutters, and clambering out onto the balcony, he leaves without fear of abandonment; magpie that she is, she is not likely to forgo the sizable amount of chips he now carries. Although he doesn't really believe that she sent him out to retrieve provisions; his curiosity set aside, he has decided to cease direct interference and adopt a wait-and-see approach.

She saved his life. Why?

He recalls the position of the nearest Old World machine as he crouches upon a ledge and drops down to the ground. She obviously used the device on her wrist to find him once; she can easily do it again.

He doesn't like leaving her there alone.

It is a terrible idea, he decides, irked at himself for even complying with her orders this far. Mars only knows what she'll find. Mars only knows what will find her.

She saved his life. Why?

He cannot see anything in this red fog. Lifting a hand to shield his eyes, he realizes that he cannot see himself.

Something sees him as he emerges on the other side, eyes watering and sight blurred, the foul taste of the cloud in his mouth despite his best efforts.

A trigger cocks. He expects it's her, caught up and playing her illusions once again. He means to turn around and sneer. He stops. Something is not right.

Heavy, labored, angry breathing.

"Look me in the face, you son of a bitch. Look me in the face so I can kill you."

* * *

 _I'm still here! Feedback always extremely valued. It means the world._


	10. No Better

**10: No Better**

"Look me in the face, you son of a bitch. Look me in the face so I can kill you."

Vulpes does not know the voice but he knows the tone: the inept boorishness of the NCR's most groveling slaves. And they are slaves, make no mistake. The Rome of ancient had called itself a republic once too, before it had dispensed with the illusions of democracy. One day, Vulpes knows, this giant of the western shore will do the same.

Only if the Legion does not push them from their self-righteous pedestal first.

"That seems contrary to my best interests," Vulpes says, partially because he can and partially to buy some time. She has the gun, that great equalizer. He should have taken the gun. He should have just taken it from her.

"Your best interests aren't gonna concern you when there's a bullet in your head," he bites back, snapping like a dog, and then, like a dog, seems to think better in retrospect. "Turn around," he says again. "Not gonna shoot you. Yet. Questions first."

 _Time_ , Vulpes reminds himself and he turns with it.

Their pale, dingy jumpsuits make them twins, just as the infamous blue makes siblings of all vault dwellers, but there rest the first and final of their similarities. Here, Vulpes thinks at first glance, is a man little more than meat to soak up bullets, to shield his betters from blades. But then he remembers.

He thought he would. He remembers tracking him through the wasteland while he tracked her. He remembers a red beret and he remembers what that means. Vulpes is very good at remembering details: a talent developed through an old desire to forget the greater picture, memorize every inch of a bloodstained fence and forget the bloody body beside it. While he no longer possesses the luxury of completely narrowing his focus, while his world now revolves around predicting that greater picture, the old habit lingers.

"First Recon," he observes from that same recollection. Vulpes doesn't mean to show off, but the fact remains that the moment the NCR dog decided to start talking, he entered a game where Vulpes is inherently superior. Fact. And the issue of time.

"What about them?" His back leg, the one supporting his lunge and the thrust of his arms, the gun that appears seamlessly integrated into his fingers in the dim red light, shifts with the question.

He fixes his gaze on the brute's weapon, intaking and analyzing everything from its caliber to the approximate measurement of the rounds loaded, but when he attempts to plot out a disarmament, all he can think of his how he should have taken her gun whether she was willing or not.

She saved his life and he doesn't know why.

"Your motto," Vulpes says instead, angling for disarmament of another fashion.

"What about it?" Fingers tighten perceptibly on a trigger Vulpes doesn't want pulled.

"What is it?" He thinks and he remembers, just as he knew he would. He remembers the words and he does not think of the woman in Silus's tent, cradling a bloody scalp and mumbling over and over again. There is simply no point in it. "'The last thing you never see coming'? Not quite, here. You were doing better when I was turned away."

"Maybe that's why I left. So bastards like you can know what killed them. Where the hell do you get off, talking about First Recon?"

"You're the right age," he observes and remembers telling the courier that she was the wrong. He remembers how he danced around her, verbally sparring when he should have pinned her to the filthy floor and taken what he wanted.

She saved his life and she won't tell him why.

"Hearing what I've heard about your kind, telling you up front I ain't interested. Where is she?"

Vulpes takes a step forward, trying his luck now that he knows he has something to try with. Just like an NCR brute, to give up information regarding the item he wants most after little more than a slightly prying observation.

Refuse crunches beneath boots, but he holds his ground against the frumentarius' advance. "What are you so afraid of? Why, a decorated veteran like yourself could hardly be threatened by little old me," Vulpes mockingly adopts the charming colloquialisms of the Mojave, narrows his eyes, and smiles his thinnest smile; not the favorite in his arsenal, but an effective tool. "Or might you be just the littlest bit… intimidated? You are the one holding the weapon, are you not?"

"I saw you with her. Where is she?"

"Or is it," Vulpes feigns consideration, "that the famed First Recon only shows bravery in the face of wounded, women, and children? Our eccentric friends in the western hills tell such extraordinary tales of your… finesse in that particular field."

He doesn't know what reaction he was expecting. What he receives in return for his efforts is less than ideal. The sniper -her sniper -chuckles, low and slow. "You looking to die? More than happy to make your wish come true, promise you that—"

"Only that you won't," he corrects. "Not while I know where she is and you do not. I find myself curious; does she know? Do you crow of your exploits to her? Whatever must she make of them?"

The dog takes the bait. He cannot resist. "That's high and mighty talk for your kind."

"I don't pretend to be anything other than what I am," Vulpes shrugs. "Unlike some."

Anger hisses through the sniper's teeth like smoke from a gun. He takes three jerky steps toward the frumentarius, losing one more piece of his advantage with each, words storming forward with his advance, eyes white-hot. "You're a lying, killing, slaving son of a bitch. If you're trying to tell me you're the good guy here—"

 _Good boy. Just a little bit more._ But he knows that, just as with any hound, he must dangle an incentive.

"I'm not saying I'm good," he says smoothly, executing his penultimate play in this altercation. "I'm saying you're no better."

* * *

Centuries-old dust makes a carpet beneath her pacing feet. She curls one fingernail around the seashell of her ear and flicks the recovered filth to the floor. No time for personal hygiene, even as she pleads with the voice in her Pip-Boy, "I need more time. Give me more time."

Father Elijah is a demanding taskmaster: as insistent as House, as unyielding as Caesar, as patronizing as Crocker. But it's okay. She's as ready to please as Yes Man.

"Earn more time," he tells her, cold and clipped. "You forget I can see you. I can see the board in its entirety and I can see each play you make. You and this first interloper may have history, but that does not mean I must humor it. Do as you are told and you may just survive this."

"I need more time," she says again, unyieldingly stubborn and unyieldingly stupid with it. She can't say no but that doesn't mean she can't bargain before she says yes. She knows her value.

"Speed is of the essence for this endeavor. Discussion of matters beyond this city is not. If I give you too much time to stare into each others' navels, you will hang yourselves with it."

"And where will that leave you?"

Stella has asked this before. She has asked it with ankles coated in river mud and dust from a march up Fortification Hill. She has asked it with her nose stinging from too-clean air and her head rolling from the view atop the Lucky 38. She has asked it in a room top full of re-purposed memorabilia and re-purposed Old World values. _"If I say no, where will that leave you?"_

Once again, she is deliberately misunderstood.

"Where it always leaves me," is the Old Man's answer. "Where I have always been. The more pertinent question is where this tiresome, coy obstinacy leaves you."

He doesn't guilt. He doesn't threaten. He merely states his advantage as facts and figures, like another voice that echoes from another machine's speaker, and they're both right. Whichever way the table spins, she loses.

"If I were you," the tinny little voice in her Pip-Boy tells her, "I would be less concerned with making threats you cannot possibly uphold and be more concerned with more immediate circumstances." He pauses. "It will be interesting to see if you survive," he remarks before the soft click of disconnection.

Stella doesn't have a person to stare at so she stares at her Pip-Boy. _"It will be interesting..."_

Her pistol is in her hand before she registers reaching for it; she's belly-down beneath the bed before she remembers choosing a hiding place. Dropped down so she doesn't drop dead, she's listening now. Listening for screeching of furniture. Listening for shuffling of steps. Listening for breathing that doesn't belong to her.

Nothing. Nothing and no one. Alone. What she's best at. _"Just go home."_

It's the weight around her throat that reminds her: she's never alone in this damned city for better or for worse. Definitely for worse when she realizes that the Pip-Boy had been the right thing to be staring at all along. What she sees there, blipping up on her screen like twin telltale heartbeats, sends her scrambling out from beneath the mattress, chasing after the bogeyman himself and the devil she doesn't know yet.

* * *

There may be no scope, no crosshairs, on the shaky little pistol he's got held tight between two fists but Boone's vision is still full of angles. Never been great at numbers, but he knows where to aim a shot. Upper chest for shock value, get the bastard to look down and realize he's done for so slow and so fast. Throat's messy; knees are torture tactics. Right between the eyes if he's feeling merciful; he's not feeling so merciful. But really, he could hit any major artery from hip to collarbone and have the satisfaction of watching the son of a bitch bleed out slow.

Boone isn't feeling merciful. Doesn't make him a monster now. Whatever came before.

 _"I'm saying you're no better."_

He is better. And he doesn't need to prove it but letting this monster walk.

"Where," he says again between teeth as tight as the hands around his gun, "is she?"

"Boone."

His head snaps around to stare. He's damn lucky that the Legion bastard doesn't take advantage, that he's looking as shellshocked, stock still and staring as the courier with the broken memory slips out of the fog like a ghost, cat eyes a muddy brown in the red air, hair knotted like a tangle of crackling wires. Something electric about her. Always has been.

But he can't make himself say a name. Wrong one might come out again.

"Boone," she says again like a warning, like a prayer. Eyes slide down the bulk of his arm, slip up and steady on the gun, then travel along a phantom bullet's trajectory to its target, still breathing and still scheming. Feels himself mouth two syllables to try and get her attention back on him, but no sound comes out and he's not sure which letters they would've been on paper anyway. Should've said something. Should've said anything. Because she does the unthinkable next. The unforgivable in his law-book.

She steps between them.

* * *

 _Feedback always super-appreciated. It really lights up my day, and I get some of my best ideas from hearing readers' thoughts._


	11. Crimson Bleeds In

**11: Crimson Bleeds In**

 _"Stella, move."_

 _She doesn't move._

 _Sun burns hot on the back of his neck. Lights up her hair. "Stella…"_

 _"I don't care what color his armor is. He's a kid. You're not shooting him."_

 _Gonna miss the shot. "Kids grow up. Move."_

 _"No."_

* * *

"Move."

He can't see her face but he can see her shoulders pulse with each breath taken. Vulpes can see the upper right corner of the sniper's face contorted in betrayal, anger, but confusion most of all; the NCR dog wears a face like a brash and brazen sign of the Strip, and in return he has no gift for reading the broken lights in others. The frumentarius privately reasons that this must be what irks the poor fool most of all in the courier. As it irks Vulpes.

"Move," he says again. She doesn't move. Again: "Move."

"No."

Vulpes is pleased. He is pleased by the way the sniper's face seizes up with the treason. "Why?" He is pleased by the way the hound almost gags on the word.

"Because you'll shoot him," she says and Vulpes silently agrees that was obvious.

"Somebody needs to shoot him," he growls and with that Vulpes finds disagreement.

"You can't shoot him," she tells her loyal mutt in a voice like a broken bird; a new sound that the Legion spy had not yet heard come from her throat. Interesting.

"Why?" That same plea, all choked out. "Tell me why."

Vulpes says nothing. He does not need to. It is her words that hold the weight now; it is her voice that will be the final blow that brings the walls tumbling down. Vulpes has done his part, yes, chiseling away at the foundation, inspiring the cracks, and he has done it well. But it is this courier that is the catalyst in this, as she is in most everything else, and he verbally steps back now because she is saying everything she needs to say, everything he wants her to say, and he need not say anything. It is a silent triumph, but a triumph all the same and he need not gloat to make it real.

"I will," she says. "I promise." She takes a step forward. Strange for him, Vulpes hardly listens to her words, only watches her movements. "But not here." Another step. If this is a play to disarm the dog, it may just work. "Alone."

Alone. The word is his entire head plunged eyes-open into a bucket of ice water.

"Just a second, Boone," she continues to plead so the sniper must appear skeptical still. "It'll take just a second. But alone."

"Like hell I'm letting that snake out of my sight for a second."

"Please," she whispers like she doesn't want the monster in her shadow to hear her beg. "I'm asking you to trust me one more time. Just this one more time. It will all make sense. Let me make it make sense."

This time, her words soothe the sniper and inflame the spy. All make sense… to whom will it all make sense? She saved his life and he does not know why; not because _she_ did not yet know why and that the subconscious reason would become obvious to her in time, which is what he had erroneously presumed. No. It is not that. It is that she has ruled that he does not deserve to know, that he had not earned his place.

His fist tightens around the bundle of chips in his left hand. He has _always_ earned his place.

The sniper hesitates, as cowed by her as Vulpes has pretended to be. He does not think the dog is pretending. But Vulpes, once more, is pleased.

Not pleased. Strange. Odd. Not pleased, but… darkly determined.

His grip on the fabric releases. Poker chips scatter and clatter across the pavement in a diaspora, alternately bouncing and rolling to ricochet against plasterwork baseboards and fountain lips. The noise calls attention quickly, but he is quicker as the two fools snap out of a world that simultaneously revolves around and ignores his presence all at once.

He is not above what he is about to do, he reminds himself as he takes two small, quick steps forward, the bloodstained cloth twisted between his two skilled hands. He has orchestrated every unthinkable, savage, vicious act that one human can commit against another. He has planned them out, elevated them to an unspeakable art, and sent other humans, his instruments, to do the bloody deeds. He is above nothing.

Especially not this. By comparison, this is snow white.

* * *

She can't breathe.

Her hands grapple at her throat, above the metal choke of a collar, pulling and twisting at her own damned sleeve that she had ripped off her shoulder to save a snake. What was the phrase; once bitten, twice shy?

If there is going to be a twice.

It's Boone's face that blurs when her throat seizes up, nose and eyes all screwed-up snarling and knuckles bleached around the trigger she had begged him not to pull, but it's _his_ voice singing softly in her ear, _his_ breath tickling the hairs on her neck.

"One step, dog," he says and her skin prickles. "One step, and it's over and where will that leave us, hmm?"

Dead. That's where. But she doesn't hear Boone do anything. She can't breathe.

"Stella, Stella, Stella," he croons to her in a voice that sends ice splintering down her spine and into her ribs. "There's something you haven't been telling me, Stella."

Fingers follow the slippery fabric, search for skin to pinch and claw, but he's got his hands twisted back somewhere she can't get at and it's becoming so hard to move her arms…

"That's star, you know," he whispers to her, "in Latin. Are you seeing stars now, my dear?"

Legs jerk. It starts at her hips as a desperate impulse and it's over before she feels it. Can't feel anything. No stars; everything's swimming and murky. Can't breathe.

"You've been keeping secrets," he chides her, soft and slick. "Quite unnecessary. Don't you see you're on our side? I don't _want_ to do this." The noose tightens and threads tear from her scalp. "I don't _enjoy_ it." Tightens. His old trick from before. There will be bruising, she knows, like the fingerprints on her wrist. Not that it matters if there's not gonna be a twice. "But I _will_ do it should you force my hand."

"She can't tell you anything if she can't breathe!"

Right. She can't breathe.

Trigger cocks. "You kill her, you're dead."

Anybody kills anybody, they're all dead. But telling requires breathing and she—

She's turning blue in her head. Not right. Supposed to be green. She's the green girl. What Sunny used to call her after she woke up that first time and missed every single bottle on the shooting range by a mile: the greenest thing in the Mojave. The only green thing in the Mojave.

Or at least before all the crimson bled in and forced her to change.

There was a hole in the sleeve she tore for a bandage. Just above the elbow. She remembers.

* * *

Boone doesn't see how she does it. One moment she's kicking like a poor bastard on a cross, the next the twist of cloth looped around her neck is in two and she's spun herself around. Teeth bared. Hair snarled. Fingers like talons.

She's got the son of a bitch by surprise and she's doing everything Boone's dying to do. Right fist cracks across a chiseled jawline. Left hand claws across a smug face. Ragged fingernails tear an angry red streak across a blue eye just barely shut in time. Gasping for air, growling when she's not.

Boone has never seen her like this.

Can't get a shot in when she's like this, like a dust devil whirling, and everywhere at once. Bastard can't keep up with her frenzy but the flip side's that neither can Boone. _Move_ , he's about to say, staring down the sight and seeing nothing to shoot at, but the bastard moves first.

Her shoulder slams into his solar plexus; her arms flop around his chest. She hits him like the bullet he wants to fire, was gonna fire, and when he's done heaving up his empty guts he realizes that he can fire and he takes his aim at the Legion bastard that threw her at him, that's about to hightail it out of there like the bastard asshole coward he is. He's got him, right in the back of the head, the right shot lined up, finally all lined up, and he's just gotta take it and he's gonna take it now—

Fingers wrap around his wrist like a cuff and jerk skyward. The bullet kisses the clouds instead.

Eyes glow cat-green. She's got both of her hands round his one wrist and she twists with all her little might, like Carla fake-beating her little fists against his back when he's carrying her out the bar door for a laugh. Just about as effective.

Eyes flash like he's said it out loud. She drops down, drags his hand down with both of hers and the gun too, sweeps her leg and sweeps his legs out from under him. He goes down cursing -cursing her, cursing Andy for teaching her, cursing whatever damn ranger taught Andy -but he's damned sure to take her down with him. She flops against his chest split-second after he grunts, hitting the ground hard, and the gun…

Torn between their fingers, the gun goes flying, goes clattering, goes skidding across the surface like a damned skipping stone, and lands exactly where it's not supposed to.

The bastard, asshole, coward, so many words and still not nearly fucking enough, bends down and picks up the gun, lips stretching with revelation. Grinning ear to ear like it's Christmas come early, like he's been waiting all year for this.

Hell, maybe he has been. Boone has.

He's finally looking down that barrel. This is his debt collector, he thinks. This is life finally evening up the score. Finally.

And yet.

"Stop it!" She's screeching. Doesn't know what for. Told her this was coming. Told her it was inevitable. Here it is.

And yet.

"Stop it!" She snaps up from his chest and steps between one more time. Wants to shout, wants to shout at her not to cheat him, not to rob him of this, but she's shouting but he can't hear anymore, not when she's walking into the muzzle of a gun meant for him. He wants.

He wants but he can't. Same as usual. Even in this one more time. Especially in this one more time.

* * *

 _I probably should update the rating to M... Boone has a bad mouth._

 _Feedback is super-appreciated. I love to hear from you all and it really lights up my day._


	12. Garden of Beasts

**12: Garden of Beasts**

She's walking into the mouth of another gun.

Stella doesn't remember why she did it last time. She doesn't remember _who_ did it, what kind of woman agreed to be the messenger that got shot, because it sure as hell wasn't her. She doesn't remember what kind of woman was running up the 15 toward the shining city with a platinum chip in her pocket, whether that woman took the job as a lark or maybe to pay a debt, but it wasn't her.

Neither here nor there now.

Got her spotter behind her again, ready to whisper a mark between wheezing breaths, and she's damn sure what target he's gonna call, but she's setting up another kind of shot. She's playing her ace now, even if she'd been hoping to save it for another occasion.

Sky-eyed snake's waiting for her to give him a reason not to shoot her down. She knows House knows she's expendable. Can always find another dupe with an eye for platinum. He knows House knows she's expendable. Be a fool not to have figured it out.

He's many things, but not a fool.

That chip isn't in her pocket anymore. Not fair.

Neither here nor there. She's not something better. For the first time she can remember, she's got something better.

Or something worse, which way you look at it.

"You see these collars you've been asking about?" she demands and she keeps walking forward toward gunmetal-colored death. "You think you know all about these things, I'll bet," keeps walking, "but I got news for you."

Cold metal stings her clavicle. He doesn't budge; neither does she. Becoming a habit. She waits for sensate memory, for something to come rushing back at what must've been, of how the night-chilled center pin must've tattooed ice against her forehead. But nothing comes. There is only _this_ her and _this_ monster and _this_ gun, the only three things that matter in this moment.

And telling the truth.

She doesn't think he's going to like this truth.

He's a liar; probably doesn't like any kind of truth.

But he's a liar whose job is to go and find the truth. Or at least make the truth.

Still can't believe him.

"If you shoot us," _this_ her says to _this_ monster with _this_ gun between them, "either of us, and we die, your head blows up. Got it?"

His face doesn't flicker. She doesn't know if he's got it. Stupid to put the spy at her back but knowing that he'd be stupider to shoot her, Stella finds Boone's face.

Harder to look at him without his shades, so she doesn't really look at him. Find out if that's a mistake later.

Her throat closes in on itself but she makes herself speak. "And it works the other way around," she tells the widow-maker widower. "So nobody is threatening nobody. Nobody is hurting nobody. Nobody is killing nobody. Got it?"

She's looking at the wolf at her back by the time she wraps it up; too hard, too much, to look at the widower widow-maker.

Still hasn't told her how he knows. If he knows. If anybody knows, which she doesn't.

The wolf is looking back. She's got the shiver-sending sense that behind that flicker-free face, he's got his tongue running from one sharp tooth to the next, cold and metallic like what's in his hand.

She waits for something to happen.

It doesn't happen.

She waits for something to happen.

It doesn't happen.

This feels familiar, but she can't quite put her finger on it. Close, so close, but not there. She imagines remembering how those moments felt, before that miniature apocalypse.

Her imagination is shit.

A muted howl and a soft shuffle of dragging feet echo in the distance, calls all of their attention to the fact that there're plenty of other _things_ out in that crimson haze just waiting to kill anybody.

Stella watches the Legion spy's throat convulse once, twice, eyes hooded by shadow and made unreadable by it. "Well then," he says slowly, deliberately. " _Pergamus_ ," he says, arches an eyebrow, and then translates for the lesser students among him. "Let's get on with it."

Boone doesn't say anything. She's not sure that he believes her. Trusts her. She was a stranger. That's a start

She's not a stranger anymore.

* * *

She's not a stranger anymore.

Craig Boone's not a thinker. He knows this. He's a soldier. He's a sniper. Not a thinker. Makes him wonder sometimes what First Recon was thinking when they pulled him. If they were thinking at all. Must've been. They're damn good at what they do. He's damn good at what he does. What he is. Not a thinker.

Makes the stray thought, real thought, count all the more. Especially when he can't get it out of what passes for his brain.

He remembers what he was thinking when he first saw Carla. Hurts to remember, but he does. She was slipping him a sideways look up the bar before sidling on over and asking what was so special he'd done to merit a stool when it was standing room only New Year's Eve on the main floor. Didn't want to tell her it'd been because he'd been parked there all afternoon, so he said he was a VIP or something. She'd laughed her laugh and said he looked mighty important.

She'd been a stranger. That was a start.

She's not a stranger anymore.

He's looking at Stella and he's looking at the legion bastard behind her and he's thinking that somewhere behind their faces, something about them's looking mighty alike.

* * *

They stumble to the banks of a fountain: a poor substitute for the great Colorado but beggars simply cannot be choosers. Vulpes knows this. The NCR dog cradles his jaw, the courier rubs raw at the ring around her throat, but he feels no sympathy. For either of them. For any of them.

She saved his life. Now he knows why.

The figure of a woman hovers suspended above the empty basin, brows arched, skirt hiked up like a whore. His eyes instantly avert. Beyond her, golden gates glimmer in the distance, metal alloy twisting out too familiar letters. This mother of mountains that he pursued this profligate, this woman, this courier to catches his eye and winks a promise. He just cannot make out the words.

The mutant released from its cage lurks in the hologram's tremulous light, eyeing them all. What passes for eyes, bound up in polluted flesh and scored flesh, pass over Vulpes and the courier and rest on the sniper, two steps behind her and two steps ahead of him. A low chuckle rumbles. "You are not who I was expecting."

The NCR dog finds his voice for the first time since the confrontation, cracked lips parting and croaking out, "I'm getting that a lot."

In the corner of Vulpes' vision, his voice ignites her in a fashion that the frumentarius had considered himself a master of. Irritation bubbles into a green-eyed froth at the way her shoulders snap around, her hair swings, her eyes spark, even the way she spins around and beats her fists against the sniper's chest, shoulders, any surface she can reach. She attacks him in much the same manner she did Vulpes, but it is not the same. Blows soft. Fingers coiled. Ragged nails tucked away where they cannot harm anyone. A broken mirror image where all of the sharp edges have been filed down. Canine incisors sanded down beyond recognition. Claws ground to stubs.

"I… told… you… to go… home, Boone." The blades of her shoulders, just visible through the thin jumpsuit, rise and collapse with each word. "I told you," a shove, "and Cass," her elbow, against the sniper's outstretched arm, "and Arcade," the flat of her littlest finger slips and falls into the trap where upper arm meets chest, "and Veronica," another shove; he can feel the hunger growing, the want, the scratches on his face and neck are closing up and he wants her to tear them open again so he has a reason to push back, an excuse to pin her to the wall and give her the fight, the _real_ fight, she's begging for, if only because that damned NCR degenerate will not, "and even that _stupid_ floating eyeball to go home!"

"Yeah." The degenerate's knee buckles; she's got him backed up against the lip of the fountain, but now he holds his ground. "But you didn't come creeping up on any of their homes, asking to be followed."

She stiffens like a prisoner who hears a whip's whisper somewhere in the near distance. "I didn't 'ask' you anything."

"Didn't you?"

She looks at him. He doesn't touch her. She wants him to touch her. Vulpes can see it not in her face, but in the slight angle of her upper arm, in the tilt of her upper body and the way her calves, the jumpsuit legs rolled up to reveal them, compensate for it. She wants to be touched, just like that profligate coquette whose flickering silhouette illuminates them all, and he won't touch her.

 _"If I may interrupt…"_

The light blips out, the flirt's smiling face to be quickly replaced with another, less pleasant visage. The mutant looks first, shadow-eyed yet eager, and for all it claims to be a god, it growls like any beast at what it sees.

 _"The festivities await, and seeing as you each have a part to play in them…"_

The Old Man's choice of words irk Vulpes no less than they should. He is the greatest of Caesar's frumentarii, no matter what beast tells him that those words mean nothing. He is one to move pieces, not to be moved as one. That centurion who sought to censor him by crucifixion learned this; Caesar himself always knew, and even here his chest puffs with pride at that fact.

Yet the memory of his own rise should remind him that pieces can very easily become players.

All the more reason to watch this courier all the more closely.

She saved his life. Now he knows why.

He is the greatest of Caesar's frumentarii. Regardless of who listens. Regardless of who knows. Regardless of who cares. Caesar saw this in him, even in his darkest hour. This he knows to be a fact.

* * *

 _A/N: I'm still here! Just keeping my nose above the water and still keep writing. This chapter's title is an homage to Erik Larson's "In the Garden of Beasts" which I highly recommend. It's not a novel, which makes it all the more chilling. No spoilers._

 _ed-e: Thank you! While I don't think Boone and Vulpes are going to start playing baseball together, they have a lot of common ground. I totally get the issue with names and pronouns; this writing style creates some confusion, but I'm trying to get better at it. Practice makes perfect. And Christine will definitely appear. Just give me time. :)_

 _guest 9/19/15: I don't think I replied to you last chapter. My bad. I'm glad that both Boone and Vulpes are working out for you. Past (or lack thereof) and present will be a big part of this story, and I look forward to continuing with it as well!  
_


	13. Unnatural Allies

**13: Unnatural Allies**

Father Elijah's lecture simmers to a crackle. Then just a hum. Then silence. A blip of darkness just after the good-bad father's visage blinks out and just before the no-name woman returns, the blip of darkness when Stella realizes:

She's never been so scared in her short, half-life.

Plenty in the Mojave to be scared of. Raiders. Cazadores. Liars. Deathclaws.

She doesn't want to be a liar. She doesn't want to be a deathclaw either, but she never had any say in that. The dice just fell in her favor. Or maybe they didn't. Maybe she is a deathclaw and everyone's been too polite to let her know.

Impossible. No one is polite in the Mojave.

Except Vulpes Inculta.

Except when he isn't. Which is less than it should be.

She's never been so scared. Platinum in her pocket didn't make her omniscient. Didn't make her blind or deaf neither; Stella knows one thing for certain, which happens to be that she doesn't know what she's doing. The most she can count on, she knows, is that no one else knows what they're doing either.

She wants to pray to that no-name, long-dead woman in the slit-open skirt like a patron saint because she doesn't know who else to pray to.

They're looking at her. When he's not looking at his feet, Boone's looking at her, sliding her sideways looks of _guiltyguiltyguilty_. _Who's guilty, Craig Boone?_ she wants to demand, wants to snap at him like a coyote with a small animal between its jaws. But she's not sure if she's the dog or its meal and she's not sure which is worse, so she doesn't say anything at all.

Nothing sideways about the way the other one looks at her. Blue eyes scan her head to toe; nothing feel-sy about it. Looks at her the way she looks at those odd little vending machines, like he wants to take her apart with something just a little more delicate than a machete, just a little more artful than a chainsaw, and put her back together just to see how all the rusty, corroded, jagged edges fit back together. Looks at her like her skin's all glass windows. She wishes it was all mirrored glass instead, but can't all get what we want.

The nightkin's watching her too, but she feels a little bit better about that than the rest. Little bit less on edge really, with the eyes of a God that's no way an actual god on her. Makes her wonder if it's easier, being a deathclaw.

Probably. She doesn't think deathclaws think things. Feel things. A total lack of any sense of consequences would be awful nice right about now. But they're all still watching her. So this time she makes herself speak.

"We're doing what he says."

Might as well have blown Hoover Dam to hell and back for all the blowback that flies into her face.

"Like hell we are," Boone says flatly.

Anger boils over the pain. "Do you have a better idea?"

"Yes," the other one answers smoothly.

She glares. "Not asking you."

"Of course you were." But she thinks she hears his smooth-as-silk voice start to fray. Hard consonants subtly grate. Vowels are a hair off-key. She can hear it. Just barely. It gives her hope.

"Like hell she was." To Stella, he says, "Bastard could be bluffing."

"Do you want to test that theory, profligate?"

On the outskirts, the nightkin shifts in his own shadow. "Gamblers, the lot of you," it rumbles. "It would figure."

"I," Vulpes says, a curling lip betraying strange stoicism, "am no gambler."

"You think that will help you here," replies the other abomination, "It will not." To Stella, it says, "The Old Man thinks himself no gambler either. Necessity, the task he has set for himself, the prize he lusts for, have not changed his way of thinking. He believes that all games can be won, if only by… alternate means."

"He's a damn cheat," Boone hisses between his teeth. Callused fingers try and worm their way between the skin of his neck and the metal that circles it, try to earn some breathing room. There is no breathing room, she wants to tell him. All part of the deck stacked tall against them.

"So cheat the cheat," says Vulpes but he's talking to Stella and Boone sees.

"Don't you talk to her."

Words hang heavy in the air between them. Stella wants to shoot Boone a look but her eyes are as leaden as bullets. His flutter like blue cazadores, to her, to Boone, back again. He gets as far as, "I don't believe that is how this works," but he doesn't get any further.

"I told you not to talk to her." He takes a step. ( _Boone_.) "You don't talk to her." Takes a step. ( _We're not doing it this way_.) "You don't smile at her." Takes a step. ( _It won't work._ ) "You don't touch her." Feet plant. ( _That's far enough_.) "You don't look at her." Weight settles; her lips move but her throat's all snipped up violin strings "You hear me?"

"We are doing what he says."

The scorching humidity singes her throat, makes her lungs light up red hot, but it's better than saying nothing. Doing nothing. So she's been told. Personally, Stella rather enjoys doing nothing, but this isn't the right occasion.

They're both watching her again, so she makes herself speak.

"Elijah," she clarifies because Vulpes looks smug and Boone looks like he's about to smash whatever's closest. "We're doing what Father Elijah says."

"Not my father," Boone mutters, "so I don't see why I'm gonna do a thing he says."

"No, but you will," she snaps. "Because _I'm_ doing what he says which means _he's_ ," she points at Vulpes, accuses the accuser, "gonna keep following me which means _you're_ ," she stabs her finger back at Boone, marks the marksman, "gonna come along too. To make sure he doesn't look at me."

But she looks at Vulpes again and she doesn't like what she sees. He is looking at her, even now, and she doesn't like the way he grins at her, familiar, conspiratorial, like he's enjoying this and knows she's enjoying this and knows that they'll both be enjoying it again soon enough. Whatever this is.

"We wouldn't want that, now would we?" he says archly to her. The corners of Boone's mouth collapse toward the broken tiles and, no, she doesn't want this. She doesn't want this at all.

* * *

 _"Are you a crow," he asks her with one hand fisted around her wrist, "a carrion beast, to come and feast upon the dead and the dying?"_

 _Radioactive eyes meet his goggles and slide downward like acid rain against a glass pane. He triumphs in her apparent subservience, but victory does not last long. Her response speaks to her ignorance, but the delivery is all cheek. "What's a crow?"_

 _Subservience, he knows too well, can too often lead to subversion.  
_

* * *

Even snakes have to sleep, even if the creeps don't shut their creep eyes. This one does, eventually, though Boone wouldn't've been too shocked to find out that the Legion bastard sleeps with eyes wide open, still watching, still tracking their every move. Everything's been coming up snake eyes lately.

It's when the four of them've made a camp in a broken home -must've been somebody's home; Novac was never anybody's home, was a hotel, before he and Carla decided to plant their family there, thought they could somehow turn back time, stupid, stupid, stupid, and tried their damnedest -and when the snake's curled up in a corner and the mutant by the door that Boone makes the move he doesn't want to be tracked. Crouches so he's out of sight of the windows. Crunches debris -he doesn't bother to figure out what it is -beneath his boots.

Scarred shoulder blades and long long legs folded up between exposed drywall and a ragged couch, her eyes flash open at the crackle of broken glass. She doesn't sleep much or well, this he knows, and he doesn't blame her. Boone's wondered how they, the Khans and the checkered bastard, got her, whether they pulled her off the interstate, dragged her out of some bar, or maybe yanked her out of her bed itself, whether they grabbed her arms first so she couldn't hit them hard, or maybe her legs so she couldn't run, or maybe stuffed a rag in her mouth first so she couldn't scream. She's a fighter. She would't've gone quiet. He'd like to think Carla would've done the same, but then he doesn't because they'd've probably hurt her more and he doesn't want to think about that.

Except when he does. When there's red in his crosshairs and a debt to be repaid.

This isn't one of those times.

His mouth cracks as it opens. "Hey."

"Hey." Her lips are cracking too. Her little tongue darts out to wet them and she winces.

He shifts his weight even though he's sitting; not much to shift. "He hurt you?" he asks because he's got no other words; there are no words.

Her head moves sideways but she's not shaking her head, just turning away from him. "Doesn't matter," she says and he doesn't know what doesn't matter, whether it's whether or not the bastard's hurt her, really hurt her, or whether what really doesn't matter is whether or not Boone knows. Deserves to know.

He's not sure he does.

"D'you know where it is?" he asks her even more quietly because he doesn't know what else to say. He doesn't elaborate. He trusts that she knows.

Not a stranger anymore.

She doesn't move. Not at first. Thinking, the way he can't. He waits. She suddenly fiddles with the machine on her arm, turning knobs and dials every which way. One green light in the dark. Slow going, but he waits. Boone's not patient, except when he is. He can wait for the shot to line itself up.

This is one of those times.

Her wrist thrusts forward. His eyes narrow, zoom in and focus on the tiny flickering-light letters marching across a bottle-green backdrop: _i don,t no did they leave u anything_

He remembers other letters marching just as painstakingly along a blotchy sheet, remembers the feeling of the twist of scrap paper in his back-pocket. It's not there anymore. He shakes his head.

Fingers with nails bitten down to stubs, cuticles torn ragged, fiddle with slow desperation one more time, trying to put thoughts into words with as much damned difficulty as he's got on a day-to-day. She's so quick to speak and to speak right; this is new. This is different.

Nearly smacks him in the nose with the force of her delivery this time. _he can;t no_

"Who?" he whispers. "Him?" he jerks his head at the sleeping snake in the corner.

 _him god elijah_

 _elijah can;t no i had it_

 _vulpes can't no i lost it_

Lit up in that Pip-Boy green, her eyes are wide and worried. He can't swallow down the sight of her, so he just nods.

"Got it," he mutters back at her and she nods, flips off the light, and settles back into her hollow like a coyote in its den. She closes her eyes and her chest rises and falls like an unsteady wave with relief. Stella's not short, not small, not fragile, but she looks fragile in this dim light. Looks the way she did in the Novac twilight on the other side of those teeth, ground so far down yet still she's looking up at him. Makes him pause when his mouth opens again. Makes him swallow down the memory of the ghoul in the shades because even if he's got words, they're not the words he wants. There are no words.


	14. Dishonest Hearts

**14: Dishonest Hearts**

Stella feels sticky.

There's the humidity clinging to her jumpsuit and seeping into her skin, but it's not that. There's the thick fog that makes a wide street claustrophobic, but it's not that. There's her own sweat, rolling cold and clammy down her back, but it's not that. She feels sticky like anything that anybody throws at her will latch onto her body and hold tight. Grenades hiding behind her knees. Words pinched along her ears. Bullets sprouting from her temple. There's been so much thrown at her. Knives and baseballs and teeth sunk in deep. Promises and obligations and debts to be repaid. His whispering dead-weight on top of her. All clinging to her skin and refusing to let go.

Only a matter of time before she collapses under the weight of it all.

* * *

Escort mission. Get the mutant to the station. Keep its hide in one piece, even if its mind is a lost cause. The field, so far as Boone's limited scope can see, stands two monsters and two…

Numbers were never his strong suit. Words, categories, labels neither. Something tells him that's why he joined up with the Bear, so figures caught between his crosshairs could light up good or bad. No bear's claws backing him here. So he sticks to _Us_ and _Them_ and figures his fists and a rusted-up pistol are gonna have to do for making the distinctions.

 _Puesta del Sol_ , she says when he's asking where they're going with two monsters in tow. They aren't talking much. Same as usual. But this she says. Spanish, he thinks. Something Spanish. He hears the words in a warm baritone, sees them unfurl out like smoke from beneath Manny's mustache. Tries to mouth along, like he always does. Hears the bastard laugh, like he always does. But that bastard had been smiling ear to ear when she disappeared and ain't nothing to laugh about that.

Not disappeared. Boone knows where she went while he was out on watch, where they took her. Only he doesn't know where she ended up, where he put her. But she was a good girl, so if anyone was gonna go up, gonna be her. But now she's just another good, lost girl, and there are damn plenty of those. Must be hauling ass upstairs, trying to make floorspace for all of them. Lending out white dresses. Running out of wings. Borrowing halos.

 _Puesta del Sol_ , and he thinks it's got something to do with the sun, thinks he's heard the word bubble out of Manny's mouth as a lame excuse for a fucked shot. No sun here and since Stella's clearly smart enough to know what the sun looks like, he doesn't think she came up with the name. Makes him wonder who did. Makes him wonder if that ghoul in the shades knows.

Should probably speak up about that.

 _Puesta del Sol_ , says the sign on the gate or so Stella says, blonde head cocked sideways like a hair trigger, green eyes slanted like a shutter-scope. Takes her a while. Slow to read and slower to write, but she's a hell and a half better than Boone at both so he's not complaining. He tilts his head up and squints as if trying to read the sky instead. Still no sun. Sky looks like the ceiling of one of those red rock caverns where Manny grew his first mustache. Makes him wonder if they've been trapped in one of them the whole time, that the red rock is gonna crack and come tumbling down on their heads any second now, settling a score that the Khans can't. He wonders and she passes through into a nonexistent sundown, since the sun never came up in the first place. One monster shadows her, and the other—

Gravel crunches. Bone's neck snaps back to attention. Blue eyes watch him, watch the gun held two fingers too slack in his grip. Boone tightens up.

"You are going to arm me eventually," says the Legion boy.

The absolute certainty in his voice makes Boone's fingers tense on the trigger but he feels his mouth curl up at the same time like a cazadore going in for the sting.

"Not today," he tells the lying, spying, slaving sack of shit and the satisfaction he feels is enough to make him stop wondering. Enough to make him forgot all about the ghoul in the shades and the good, lost girl, at least for now, and keep his eye and his attention on the good girl he's still got between his crosshairs instead.

* * *

Vulpes is beginning to enjoy this.

The abomination has stepped ahead. The hound has fallen behind. The NCR dog would likely claim to be seeking the superior vantage point, but his inner tension is palpable. Vulpes is beginning to enjoy that as well. It gives him openings, tiny mouse-holes, little cracks where a cold draft can slip in unhindered. And he intends to take full advantage.

"Follow the wires," he suggests delicately when the messenger girl's face is twisted up along with the convoluted city around them and the reflected labyrinth map flickering on her wrist. "It is a switching station. That suggests electrical pursuits."

"You think you're that good," she says.

He tries not to smile. "I am," he says simply because while he rejects the Old World and its littered remnants, logic is as much a pillar of his society as any.

But she isn't looking at him. And she still has not gifted him with a gun.

"You think I'm angry," he observes. "I'm not. You think I feel betrayed. I don't. You may have saved my life only to preserve your own, but _that_ is logical. _That_ , I understand."

"That's about all that people like you understand," she mutters.

"People like us," he corrects softly and then pauses. Feigns a revision. "Ah," says the fox in him, canine teeth glimmering in a grin. "Your heart of gold. I forgot."

"Better than your heart of lead," she mutters. She does that often, this muttering. He wants to teach her otherwise, wants to instruct her in the fine art of taking those cruel impulses and filing them razor-sharp.

"It weighs heavy still," he rejoins smoothly. "Gold is soft." He pauses, reprises his smile. "Malleable."

Her brow knits. If she does that often, it will leave a mark upon that fair skin. Good. Youth is all very fine and useful, but in this wasteland marks such as those, fine lines between the eyes, half-moons at the corners of the mouth, are trophies to be admired. Badges of survival. And yet the offense she has taken amuses him. He did not outright name her for what she is, and yet she hears it. Knows what she is. Impressionable to handprints. Malleable to suit another's greater purpose since she, like so many others, believes she has none of her own. Her purpose died with that buffoon in the garish suit. Which reminds him.

"The Chairman," he says and that is all that is required.

"You said that was a test." Her boot scuffs up against an unfinished cobblestone.

Vulpes shrugs. "It was."

He catches her stealing glances back at the sniper, waiting for her dog to intervene, to snap his jaws and growl. He does not. Lost to whatever private hell he inhabits, the NCR mutt is not of this world. "Did I pass?" she snaps at Vulpes instead.

"Did you?" he inquires, a smiling reflection.

Green eyes look clouded yellow with uncertainty. He's beginning to enjoy that too. A pure, beautiful contradiction to the ugly, lying words that tumble from her pretty mouth. "I didn't want to shoot him. You made me."

"Did I?" Eyebrows raise.

"Didn't you?" she demands and the fog in her eyes begins to clear. Anger does that for her; not blind rage, but the sort of pure violence he has perfected. Even if she names it whatever righteousness she wishes to now, she will learn it for what it is soon. "You were gonna string him up there. I didn't want to see that, no matter what he did to me. Who the hell wants to see that?"

He steps closer and when he speaks, he imagines his breath and the words it carries fogging up those green eyes again so he can wipe them clean once more. "I think you did" he breathes into her. "I think you wanted to. I think you wanted to see him strung up there, legs flailing, shoulders breaking, tears streaming, skin blistering in the sun, for what he did to you. What he took from you. I think you wanted to make him feel exactly what you did, what you do, but you couldn't, you can't, so what _we_ would do to him would have been second-best. And you _wanted_ it. And I think that frightened you more than anything else you saw at Fortification Hill."


	15. Dead Don't Lie Down

**15: Dead Don't Lie Down**

 _"You tried to kill me. You did kill me. And then you wanted to fuck me."_

 _"As far as I'm concerned, darling, I tried to kill you, I did kill you, and then you wanted to fuck me. So who's the crazy one, huh?"_

 _"I didn't want to fuck you. I was going to kill you."_

 _"Well, now you've got your chance. Any which way you want it, baby doll."_

 _Safety flicks on and off between her fingers. On the other side of her own jagged blonde curtain, the snake-smile man is watching. Caesar is watching. They're all watching, down to the dogs. And the man in the checkered suit is waiting._

* * *

Her fingers twitch on the gun, slick metal loose in a slick grip. He knows he could take it. It would be a simple matter, efficient in design. Take and take and take and take. From behind a golden mask, Lanius disdains all kinds of waiting, but Vulpes knows thoughts inspire action. Knowing is what he is best at, and the rest follows after. And he knows how much more it will mean when she chooses to give him power, the expedited ability to end a mortal fate.

He could kill without a gun, of course; he could kill with just his two talented hands. But bodies are so _messy_ and he prefers to keep the blood from getting under his fingernails.

Acid-scarred strands drift behind her. Such a leash does not compel him. Vulpes is driven by the two hounds at his back, grappling to keep up with their mistress and thus keeping him between them. It follows that once more he follows her as he wonders what corridors her distracted mind wanders. She ducks out onto a balcony, looks to the dog who calls himself God. He feels oddly wounded, but the cut is shallow still.

"You first," she says to the beast with the most obvious monstrous bearing.

The ledge ahead is a slab of crumbling concrete and sliding shingles. The NCR dog cranes his head around, scowls at the drop. "Won't hold."

"It holds God, it'll hold us."

"One at a time," broaches Vulpes, "perhaps."

Her attention is earned, even if he had to stoop to earn it. Her grin is wolfish. "You next."

She knows the mutant's contempt for him runs deep. Why isolate him with the beast when these collars tick away at their throats? But he can feel the other dog's hatred thudding. It wouldn't surprise Vulpes if hatred of the Legion, of the wasteland, of this absolute apocalypse they had the foul fortune to be born into, is all that keeps the slab of hard muscle and dull nerves alive.

It amuses him that she trusts this unknown, mutated variable more than her sniper shadow. At least in this case.

The unknown, mutated variable hums annoyance. "Spare me," it mutters, inspiring the question of what it wants to be spared. Still, it obeys the woman with the machine looped around her wrist like so many other degenerate desert souls. Rubble flees from its massive feet and clatters below, but the abomination makes the crossing. Proving that this apocalypse has a sense of humor.

Vulpes goes next, as promised. He wonders if the NCR dog is disappointed when he survives. But the brute is probably disappointed every time a legionnaire anywhere draws another breath.

This time, this once, she follows him. Puts one foot delicately in front of the other. Braces one hand against the wall and the other hovers out like a cazadore's wing. He sees her blindfolded, balancing her way across Hoover Dam, a platinum weight in her outstretched palm and her other pushing back against Camp McCarran's concrete. He reaches out to her to again offer the Mark of Caesar and, still unwilling, she accepts.

Safer on the other side, she stands closer to him than to the NCR hound. That's all it takes to drive the dog reckless. He lurches forward onto the ledge. A miniature avalanches is inspired by his boot. Eyes stripped of shades, the pupils dart up and dilate on the courier. Plaster crumbles.

Her fingers become talons, swooping out and latching onto his wrist as he sinks. He's heavy, pulling her down, and Vulpes's arms wrap around her waist as she falls to her knees, hunched over the edge with her beloved sniper dangling below. He looks back up at his mistress with hound's doleful eyes. "Stella," he's saying to her, "Stella," he's saying, "let go."

Vulpes doesn't think she will. She can't. But he isn't surprised when the dog's wrist slips between her fingers, intentionally or because he's just heavy.

What surprises him is when she tears free of Vulpes and jumps down after the dog.

* * *

 _"Any which way you want it, baby doll."_

The tortured shapes in the red fog are screeching. They aren't the only ghosts screaming for burial. Not the most dangerous. Not in the long run. But Boone's not one of them, not yet, and that means that the rest of them have a chance to do the burying.

She doesn't know if anybody buried Benny. Walked away from the Fort too soon to find out. Before she could find out. She wonders if they've got his head on a spike. She wonders if the Legion even does that or if they stick to crosses. She wonders what happened to the centurion who wanted Vulpes strung up on one. She wonders if Boone buried Carla and if he visits her.

Standing back to back with Carla's husband, she wondered sometimes, out in the Mojave, who's gonna bury them. She wondered sometimes if whoever tripped over their corpses would toss them into the same ditch. She wondered sometimes if in her grave she'd be sleeping with another woman's man. She wondered sometimes if someone a thousand years from now would dig them up to pick through their pockets and think them man and wife. She wondered, sometimes.

Boone's got his gun. She's got her gun. Bonnie and Clyde, with a bit of baggage. Bonnie never had a pet super-mutant. Bonnie never had a snake-smile man following her around. Bonnie had shot people in the head, though. Probably. Maybe.

 _"Any which way you want it, baby doll."_

Something in the fog hisses, one claw swooping out from the mist before and scurrying away. She wakes up sometimes in an arena like this, sharp scrap metal substituted for crumbling plaster, hot dirt beneath her feet instead of moist tiles. The dogs of war hissing and jeering from above. Back to back with the one good thing the NCR gave her, waiting for a thumbs-down, waiting for a beatdown, waiting to go way down into the dust. It's not a memory, but it's almost a could-have-been. Could have been her and Benny, not back to back but blade to blade with the sun bouncing off the metal pen and burning their faces. Crimson dripping onto scorched earth like a blood sacrifice. Could have given him a fighting chance, a chance to die without his hands bound and on his feet. But he hadn't given her a fighting chance, had given her no chance but to die with her hands bound and on her knees, and he knew it. So why should she do him the favor?

 _"Any which way you want it, baby doll."_

He's still on his knees in front of her, bloodstained suit getting all dusty, bloodstained mouth gasping beneath a broken nose. He'd been so clean. She remembers that about him. She remembers that she doesn't trust people with clean fingernails, especially not when they were once wrapped around the gun that killed her.

But he's still on his knees, waiting for her to make up her mind, even here, even now, with the bloody business concluded. He's bloody inconvenient is what he is, but he always was. They all always are, everyone in the desert asking her for a favor, all bloody inconvenient. There is always blood involved.

When shadows spring forward, lunging out like coyotes in a dogfight, she's ready. They're ready. They're a team, she and Boone, whatever came before in past lives that still aren't quite over. She shoots for kneecaps; _bang, bang_. He nails them between the eyes; _bang, bang_. They know each other, surface level. They know what they do, in combat anyway. Someone else would just get in the way.

God is getting in the way. Crushing targets she'd already lined up. Getting between Boone's bullets and their burial sites. Body is a blindspot but they'll work around it. They'll work around it.

But every one they put down gets right back up.

Even God is doing his share, making up for his absent counterpart. But there's so many, there's so many. And every time they put one down, now three get right back up, and there's only two of them with—

Boone hits the ground. Her Clyde's legs kick out from beneath the living husk that's on top of him. But she's got her own problems. She's got so many problems and not enough time…

"Give me a gun!" the snake-smile man's shouting at her, blue eyes wide in a face so pale, fingers outstretched in hands so pale, so snow white innocent when they're anything but. When'd he get here? When'd he jump? She didn't see. She couldn't see. "Courier! Stella! Give me—"

 _Make up your mind._

 _"Any which way you want it, baby doll."_

She doesn't want this. She doesn't want any of this. She doesn't want anything.

 _She takes the gun —Maria —from the guard. Silver filigree turns over in her hand. Feels too fine between her fingers. Takes aim, or means to, but it's wrong, it's wrong, it's all wrong, she's turning the gun around so that the barrel lines up with her heart. She didn't do this, not before, not with the man in the checkered suit, but now it's feeling right. They're all making her choose. Means there's only real choice left, right?_

Someone's taking the gun away. It's not her choice, not yet. She hasn't earned it. Not yet.

* * *

He's gotta get up. Gotta get up, gotta get up, gotta get up now or Boone's never gonna get up again.

Bug-eyes on top of him. Knees to the belly. Talons to the throat. He's gasping out the rest of his too short life. Gotta get up or he's gonna die. Boone's good at living. Or maybe just killing everything else first. But he's tired. He's so tired of killing everything else first.

 _He's so tired. Bed's soft beneath him and she's soft on top of him and he's so tired of saying no._

 _He's gotta say no. Gotta say no, gotta say no, gotta say no now or Boone's never gonna get to say no again._

 _She's on top of him and damnit it feels good. Skin smooth where it's not nicked with landmarks of scar tissue and bug bites. Mouth warm and inviting. But he's gotta say no. Gotta say no. Gotta say no._

 _Word won't come. Sticks behind his crappy teeth and won't pry loose. He's so tired of saying no._

 _Carla used to purr in the dark. Hold him back, take her time, feed her flame. Boone'd been so used to screwing like a soldier, screwing like it's his last night on this crappy planet, but she made him slow down until she'd made him so crazy he couldn't remember anything else. Hell, couldn't remember his own name. Couldn't remember…_

 _Cat Eyes screws like he used to. Screws like a survivor likely to break that track record when the sun comes up. Which is good. Mixed blessing. He can't do her like he did his wife; that'd be all new kinds of wrong. But it takes him back to the bitter before…_

 _Gotta say no._

Gotta get up. What Boone used to tell himself every screwed up morning in that screwed up motel where nobody really wanted to live. Where he didn't want to live. He didn't want to live. But gotta get up. Gotta ask another question. Gotta watch another friend-turned-suspect. Gotta wait for another stranger to show up. Gotta make these ghosts stop waking him up at night so he could apologize in person.

Not yet. Can't be long. Nothing good or bad in this damned desert lasts. What he'd told himself on that overlook with a woman tripping over her hem caught between his crosshairs. That the desert had given him Carla. Only a matter of time before it took her back.

Damned bad karma to make him be the bullet. Supposed it was only what he deserved.

 _"I'm saying you're no better."_

He closes his eyes as the talons tighten. Another good, lost girl taken back to sink into the sand. What he deserved.

But Boone hears the shot that answers him. Ears ring in its aftermath. Which means he survived. He survived. He grunts his _I-don't-care_ to continued living, shoves the limp body off of him, freezes.

The Legion scum is holding the gun. And Stella's standing in the background, face blank like her counterpart's on the auction block.

Boone couldn't do her like he did Carla but that doesn't stop him from getting them mixed up sometimes. Doesn't stop him from being sorry afterward. Like anybody gives a damn about sorry in the desert.

Legion scum doesn't glory in the high ground. Doesn't give the gun back either. "Cut up the bodies," is all he says.

Stella nods, turns to the nearest twitching corpse with a smiling knife in her grip. _Won't work_ , he wants to tell them tell them all. Dead don't lie down. Not here, not anywhere. Don't shut up neither. In the ground, they feed the geckos, coyotes, and cazadores, return to bite and sting the living until they join them. Nailed to crosses, the wind whistles through their bones and makes them talk back. Living don't want to listen. Not until a bite or a bullet makes them.

But he's not gonna try to stop them from slowing these ones down.

In the corner, God rips into a body with his teeth.


End file.
